Unix operating system is known for its powerful command line utilities. It provides a set of rich tools that are not available in Windows operating system.
We have covered the topic of Unix utilities for windows here http://www.praggo.com/2009/12/unix-commands-for-windows.html
You need to install these utilities from the website mentioned in the above article.
In this article, we are going to cover some of the Unix tools that offers quick solutions for the day to day activities.
dd
dd is wonderful command available in Unix system for raw copy. This command is best used in windows for creating ISO images of CD/DVD. Following is an example to create an image test.iso of a CD/DVD ROM present in F: drive.
dd if=\\.\f: of=d:\test.iso
wget
wget command is used to download files off the internet. Here is an example to download Sherlock Holmes – The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot from http://www.gutenberg.org/
wget http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2349/2349.txt
Another use of wget is to backup a web site. Following command creates copy of a given website for offline storage.
wget --convert-links –r http://www.gutenberg.org/
md5sum
This utility calculates MD5 checksum of a file. It is useful to ensure integrity of a downloaded file. When you distribute a file make sure to send MD5 checksum with the file so that the receiver can verify the correctness of the content.
D:\>md5sum test\2349.txt
\5847e0b214cd43a1ee66be51f5cc2b9e *test\\2349.txt
diff
It is one of the handy tools to check whether two files are different. This tool can be used to report differences in simple text files as well as binary files.
diff test1.doc test2.doc (diff treats doc as binary files)
gzip & tar
Nowadays most of the downloaded content is available in tar.gz format. Here is a command to extract the content from gzip package.
gzip -c -d test.tar.gz | tar xvf -
Above mentioned are the only few of numerous Unix tools available for Windows operating system. There is lot more to explore!