[jackalope]

When I used to install Cygwin, it was to get (in order of importance): ssh, vim, rsync & X11. Gow doesn't include the last two, so it feels like an apples/oranges comparison (for my use case). Still, it's pretty amazing what Windows doesn't include by default in this day and age, so a simple, lightweight set of tools like this definitely has its place.

I don't use Windows anymore, but if I did, I would probably just spin up a VM with a tiny live Linux ISO, because it would bring in so much other goodness without any extra effort.

[vertex-four]

> Still, it's pretty amazing what Windows doesn't include by default in this day and age

It includes the majority of stuff you'd want as part of Powershell, just under different names, and not available as separate executables on the filesystem. If Powershell is lacking something, you can access any .Net class on the system. Once OneGet is released with the next version of Windows and people start packaging stuff for it, you'll be able to grab additional utilities for pretty much anything.

Windows isn't that far behind. It's mostly just not UNIX. Most things are there, just done in very different ways.

[oblio]

Equivalents for:

wget or curl

lftp

dig

telnet

And I mean similar features, not Invoke-WebRequest, ftp, nslookup or writing my own clone in 2000 lines of Powershell.

And to this day I have no idea why telnet was removed from the base installation.

The Windows command line is getting better with Powershell, but even Powershell can't beat 1000 man years of tool development. And I really hope that package manager takes off cause right now most Windows non-Microsoft tools are either shady or crappy.

[pmoriarty]

"Most things are there, just done in very different ways."

Does it have something like the POSIX fork() system call? Apparently, its lack in Windows is the main thing that makes Cygwin as slow as it is.[1]

[1] - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2512892/how-to-speed-up-c...

[mikelward]

It only kind of has ssh. It has the PuTTY SSH client, but no SSH server.

[cplease]

> Still, it's pretty amazing what Windows doesn't include by default in this day and age, so a simple, lightweight set of tools like this definitely has its place.

Others have already mentioned Powershell. Not by default, but Microsoft has offered Windows Services for UNIX for some time. Free download too: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=274

Truthfully, I've never used it myself, because Cygwin exists and it actually provides full POSIX on Windows, unlike GOW et al.

[hughw]

Supported OSes: "Windows 2000, Windows 2000 Service Pack 3, Windows 2000 Service Pack 4, Windows Server 2003, Windows XP"

They haven't updated WSfU for years now.