I just wonder of there is anyone out there who knows if there is som software that gives a Unix lookalike MS-DOS prompt on windows so that the Command window looks like an Xterm window.
I'm really missin the Command Completion features and the way things can get piped. I know 4DOS is an option but The Filename completion doesn't work for path independent command which is a bit annoying.
I saw that "si" guy has had a Console window with a true Unix prompt with translucent background and ANSI colos on the ls command. Thats really cool! I saw that on a screenshot of his desktop theme named "cokolwiek" that can be downloaded from this site.
There are programs like cygwin that seems to be a Unix shell for windows. Is there anyone who has successfully tried it together with windows applications and everything?
- Robin.
Just to add, I've tried Console2 from
http://www.redf.net and it refused to run. I'm running WindowsXP.
Then I tried Console,
http://sourceforge.net/projects/console/, which works fine.
It doesn't colour the output from the ls command though, well, I can't see any options to add it if it can. In the screenshot mentioned I've got a feeling that si has ssh'd, in the console, into another machine and performed ls on that machine. The ls output is then highlighted doing this.
cmd.exe has tab completion by the way. Even handles quoting nicely. At least on 2k and XP, not sure about NT4. You have to enable it in TweakUI though.
As ilmcuts said xp has command line completion which can be enabled with tweak ui. You can enable file or directory completion or both.
XP also supports piping eg- net use > test.txt sends the output of the net use command to a txt file named test.txt.
Yup. It's not XP only though, that sort of piping has been around since DOS 3.x, if not earlier. :D
There's also a native win32 compile of "zsh" in UnxUtils.
cmd will even let you redirect stderr, with the same syntax as on Unix. (and judging by the results of "dir 1>&2 | dir", the two sides of a pipe are now run in parallel, just like Unix)
You can also enable completion for one instance by using cmd /F:ON, which completes with CTRL-D and CTRL-F. (and "help cmd" will tell you the registry entries to change if you don't want to use tweakui)
all unix shells are available under windows if you want them (bash, tcsh, zsh, pdksh, ...), tho they rarely work well since they are just not made for windows. Bash from cygwin for example is pretty awkward to use since original bash doesn't have to deal with drives
I remember seeing a tsch frontend(if you want to really call it that) for win32 at one point, can't rememebr where though...
I read recently that longhorn is going to have a command shell that will rival that of Unix in terms of functionality. Sorry I can't quote a source.
I would like to say thank you for all the responses I have received, it's really nice to see!
I have now downloaded and installed Cygwin together with the XFree?86 packages. It seems to be really nice. Once the paths are properly set up it seems to work really well. The rxvt shell seems to be the best one (of the ones I tried that came with the Cygwin package), and I can even run the "UNIX"-commands from MS-DOS. Some commands seem to crash on my 4DOS prompt though, like the man command when finishing for example. Too bad one cannot kill processes that is not launched through the shell.
I have so far not run into any serious issues with cygwin and dealing with drives doesn't seem to be an issue either. Although the shell has it's own root (/='cygwin path') other parts of the harddrive and the other units can still be accessed through A:/, B:/, etc.
- Robin.
Get "Debugging Tools for Windows" from Microsoft. The kill in there can kill anything, even things that Windows considers critical and will cause it to shut down & restart after 30 seconds.
Hmmm. It seems like Microsoft does not support Windows 98 anymore. I tried to install the Debug package for Windows Me (since it is based on the same kernel as Win98) without much luck. I have a program called Pview95 installed on my system (strange thing that I didn't discover this before). It can kill major processes but that's all it can really do. I cannot kill individual threads or make the system shut down from it. I can however, shutdown the system using rundll. I have now made some nice aliases that even enables me to dial-up from the command prompt through rundll.
To activate Dial-Up networking from the command prompt, the following could be entered:
rundll32 Rnaui.dll,RnaDial (name of ISP)
Where (name of ISP) means the name of the ISP you have in the Dial-Up connections folder found in explorer. Spaces without quotes are allowed.
To shut down the computer from the shell one could enter:
rundll32 shell32,SHExitWindowsEx 1
I just want to add that I have found some really good software where you can kill processes. It can be downloaded from:
http://www.prcview.com
It's available for all Win95 and NT based versions of Windows (Win95/98/Me/NT/2000/XP ...).
With this package you can manage and kill processes from a GUI as well as from the command prompt.
- Robin.