simon.proctor has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I'm very keen to implement various Unix commands on my Win2K system at home and my NT box at work and have found the following projects:
  1. Cygwin
  2. Perl Power Tools
  3. Sourceforge PPT project
On the face of it, my options are limited to the first two as the Sourceforge project looks to be rather dead (?). However, after searching this site it seems that people are using either of the first two solutions quite successfully.

The PPT project fits my bill more so than Cygwin (at first glance) as I am not interested, yet, in implementing more than a few Unix commands to make my life easier (and possibly port /update some myself).

So is the PPT project still running and are people still using it or has the preference shifted towards the Cygwin project?

If the Cygwin project is the way to go now, have any monks experienced any issues using it on NT4 with Activestate Perl and PPMs? Also, is it recommended to install and make a Perl binary directly under Cygwin instead?

To be honest, the PPT project does sit a little better with me as its all native Perl and I can learn from the various command implementations. However, it seems its not being updated very much anymore. A shame as I would have liked to have been involved in it.

Thanks
Simon

PS: I've already used the search on this site and read the following:
  1. Cygwin and PPM
  2. PPT inclusion in the Code Catacombs?
  3. col for PPT
If people needed a background :)

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: PPT and Cygwin
by belg4mit (Prior) on Feb 18, 2002 at 00:31 UTC
    Ironically the Sourceforge project was formed this summer because PPT is dead, TC has no time for it. But yes, the owners are rather busy and slow to respond. Simon Cozens had an interesting and related project named Perlix that he wrote about in TPJ, however it was lost during a move :-/

    You might also find some of the Perl shells to be useful, such as this one.

    --
    perl -pe "s/\b;([st])/'\1/mg"

[reply]
Re: PPT and Cygwin
by metadoktor (Hermit) on Feb 18, 2002 at 02:22 UTC
    I use Cygwin on my Windows system and yes there is a version of Perl installed under Cygwin and a separate one installed under Windows (i.e. ActiveState). I do not seem to experience any collisions except some strange DOS behavior where some MS-DOS commands do not seem to work as they used to but I think that is the fault of ActiveState.

    The nice thing about Cygwin is that it seems like a complete UNIX environment purportedly with cron etc etc. So you can run your perl scripts under the Cygwin shell like this: 

         ./script.pl

    [download]
    whereas under DOS, you cannot.

    I admit that it would be nice to have things like grep, less, whatever under Windows/DOS so that I didn't have to go into the Cygwin shell but oh well.

    metadoktor

    "The doktor is in."

[reply]
[d/l]

      If you add your "C:\path\to\cygwin\bin" directory to your Windows PATH, you'll be able to use less, grep, find and so on from the bog-standard DOS command line. The main use I've found for this is that I don't have to remember to use dir rather than ls on Windows; I seem to be a bit slow on the uptake and can never remember which is an SSH window and which is DOS.

      If you do this, and you've got both C:\path\to\cygwin\bin and C:\path\to\perl in your PATH make sure you know which perl you're pointing to when you type 'perl script.pl', because cygwin\bin usually has a perl in it. I've had multiple perl binaries (AS and Cygwin) and multiple ruby binaries (native Win32 and Cygwin) for a while now, and it never seems to cause many problems.

      update: On the original question, I'd have no hesitation in suggesting using Cygwin. Having gnu make in Windows means that you're only really limited by what source you can get your hands on, plus you can install *nix daemons as Windows Services - for example, Cygwin is the only way to get a PostgreSQL server running on Windows.

      //=\\
[reply]
        ... plus you can install *nix daemons as Windows Services ...
        ++ to ViceRaid for bringing up this point.

        I run cygwin sshd as a Service on a Windows 2000 box. For the rare occasions I need to use that box, i just ssh into it. Most of the times this (command line access to windows) is sufficient, unless I need to run command-line-challenged GUI programs.

        /prakash

[reply]
Re: PPT and Cygwin
by gav^ (Curate) on Feb 18, 2002 at 04:14 UTC
    There is a large amount of unix stuff here where you can find Win32 ports of cat, ls, mv, du, cp etc. There is 100+ programs included. They all work nicely and you don't have to install Cygwin.

    gav^

[reply]
      OTOH it is incredibly useful to have things that work outside of win32 ;-). As in booting to a command prompt (simply requires you to have a DOS perl installed).

      --
      perl -pe "s/\b;([st])/'\1/mg"

[reply]
Re: PPT and Cygwin
by data64 (Chaplain) on Feb 19, 2002 at 04:43 UTC

    I use Cygwin and ActivePerl on the machine at work. I have used it on NT4 before upgrading to Win2K. For the most part, everything work as long as you are not trying do a lot of cygwin shell to perl script integration. Then it starts to break, mostly because activeperl does not understand the "unix"ied path that cygwin passes it. I wish cygwin would handle the windows paths the way MKS utilities used to. There is a utility call cygpath that can convert a given file path between cygwin and windows, however it does not solve all cases in my experience. There is a version of perl that ships with cygwin but it has some serious limitations. I had issues running perl scripts out of the cygwin environment. Some of the CPAN modules would not compile under cygwin.

    As far as using ActiveState goes its not bad. They seem to have a lot of the common modules in their PPM format. If you have visual studio on you machine you can even install the CPAN module and get stuff directly out of cpan. Note that just having nmake might not be enough because some of the modules have a corresponding C/C++ code that needs to be compiled. All this being said, it still is not as easy as installing and using perl on a unix or linux box :) As far as ppt goes, I would pick cygwin if only for being able to run a bash shell and having almost the same environment on windoze and my linux box.

    <cite>Just a tongue-tied, twisted, earth-bound misfit. -- Pink Floyd</cite>

[reply]
Re: PPT and Cygwin
by rbc (Curate) on Feb 18, 2002 at 18:35 UTC
    I use cygwin and found that if there is a problem
    you can get pretty good support.

    You can use ActiveState perl if you like on cygwin but I
    don't. I prefer the cygwin port of Perl.
[reply]

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