Using Linux commands on WIndows » cyberfella ltd, since 2012.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could pipe the output from windows commands into non-windows commands like grep, cut, awk, sort etc that are available to you on alternative unix-based operating systems?

Download and install GNUWin32 from here and the CoreUtils package here and Grep here that should do it. There are more packages available though here

Once installed, add the path to the bin directory to your Windows System Environment Variable Path

A few useful commands will now be available on the command line. My favourite is comm which compares files and can be quite flexible with the output with the -1 -2 or -3 switches to suppress lines that appear in file1, file2 or both files respectively. You can also combine them e.g. -12 -23, 13 to affect the output, so that only the desired output is achieved. This takes a bit of playing around with, but is very powerful and very simple. So much so, that it is my number 1 go to tool for file comparison. Examples shown the in the screenshots below.

Note: Some Windows tools such as icacls export text to a format other than ANSI. When viewed using Notepad or Notepad++, all appears fine, but if you cat them , you’ll see there are effectively spaces between each character, meaning grep won’t work. Such text files will need to be saved in ANSI format first. You can do this using Notepad++. After selecting Encode in ANSI, save it, then retry grep for a more successful pattern match!