Over the years, I've written DOS and Windows versions of various Unix command-line utilities. The DOS ones are basically obsolete now, so here are the Windows ones. Run the command with -h for a help page, and -? for somewhat more detailed help.

Caveats

• Command-line arguments may differ from whatever Unix-ish flavour you're used to. Read the help.
• Behaviour may vary from whatever Unix-ish flavour you're used to.
• Use at your own risk. I think they work properly, based on my own testing and use of them, but there are no guarantees.
• Except as noted, all are 32-bit utilities that should run on any currently supported x86 or x64 version of Windows (and might also run on some older unsupported versions). If you're a weirdo running Windows on ARM64, you'll have to rely on Windows' built-in emulation.
• On older Windows versions (likely anything older than Windows 10 or Windows Server 2016), you may need to install the Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable. Try running the command first; if it fails with a message saying that a required DLL is missing, install the x86 version of the Visual Studio 2019 redistributable from Microsoft (or the x64 version if you're running a 64-bit version of one of these programs).

Program Listing

• cat: catenate files
• df: display free space on drive(s)
• du: display disk usage of directories
• find: directory search; search options include age, size, and file attributes. Warning: Windows has its own find command which does something very different; I'd recommend not putting my find in the PATH. Put it somewhere else and launch it with an explicit path, or rename it.
• hd: a version of the SCO hex dump utility, which I always liked better than the standard Unix od command. Try it!
• mktxt: Not actually a Unix thing, but I needed to be able to create text files (sometimes many of them, sometime large ones) to test some of these utilities, so I wrote this program. It creates one or more text files consisting of paragraphs of sentences of word-like random gibberish.
• rm: remove files
• sleep: pause for a given time
• sort: sort text from stdin. This one is available in 32- and 64-bit versions; the 64-bit version is likely quicker and can handle larger files. Warning: Windows has its own sort command with different syntax; I'd recommend not putting my sort in the PATH. Put it somewhere else and launch it with an explicit path, or rename it.
• strings: find and print text strings in binary data
• touch: update file times
• uniq: eliminate duplicate lines of text
• wc: count words, lines, and characters; counts large files in parallel by default
• xargs: construct command lines from text; has an option to run commands in parallel

Downloads

You can download the latest versions here. Enjoy!