I see that cmd.exe is included with XP -- slight relief (command.com was all I knew, and it's such a pain), but this is still no substitute for bash. Oh well, at least I have a couple places to start looking (including Cygwin).

Thanks to both of you!

Update: following the Gnu link provided by BrowserUK above, I also happened to find yet another source of unix-environment tools for windows: http://www.research.att.com/sw/tools/uwin/ -- where the offerings include ksh (like bash, sort of, but a little different), which does what I want: pipes work as expected. It can also do real unix-style handling of the shebang line in perl scripts, and there appears to be an X-Windows component to the overall package -- gotta check that out... Altogether a very slick looking setup, though apparently not open-source.