Lightweight, Windows-friendly Installation of Cygwin

[Jim Monty]

I use the MKS Toolkit at work. I've never really used Cygwin because every 
time I look at it, I run away screaming because of the gazillion choices it 
seems I'm forced to make, the volumes of documentation I'm forced to read, and 
the fact that Cygwin seems to impose whole new computing paradigms on me 
like /cygwin/c (huh?!). I was a Unix guy when it was UNIX(r), but now I can't 
be bothered to think in two operating system. The MKS Toolkit doesn't force me 
to do this. I stick in the installation CD, click a few buttoms, make hardly 
any decisions, and moments later I'm able to do stuff like this at a Windows 
Command Prompt:

C:\Documents and Settings\Jim Monty>find "C:\Program Files\Microsoft" -type f 
| wc -l

When I want to use a Bash shell, I type 'bash' ('bash -o vi', actually) and 
use a Bash shell. When I'm done, I type 'exit'.

I want to be able to do this for free on a *personal* personal computer I just 
bought (my first one in twenty years). So I want to install Cygwin, but I 
don't want to have to learn anything Cygwin-ish. I think I know enough about 
both Windows and Unix already that I shouldn't be forced to learn anything 
new. It seems unfair to me to be both a dinosaur and a newbie all at once.

Is there a lightweight Cygwin that just lets me run Unix-ish commands under 
Windows? I'm not porting software or developing cross-platform applications. I 
just want to 'strings' a file once in a while.

Jim Monty



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