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http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=2391

If I am forced to use Windows in an Enterprise setting, then I just go to Control Panel and enable the POSIX layer ("SUA"), then download the SDK and install. With some minor changes to the %Path, it just works.

SUA has older versions of tcsh, ksh, vi and many other utilities, including an older Perl and an old GCC toolchain that does work. It is 4.2BSD based. If you are at home on BSD, it is like going back in time.

netcat, tmux, emacs, etc. you would have compile yourself. Maybe OpenSSH would compile and run. I have not tried.

Perhaps an alternative to Cygwin, etc. Not "better" but different. It generally "seems" faster and I find it's more difficult to "break" than Cygwin which in my experience can be very "delicate". The SUA White Paper says SUA comes to within 10% of the speed of native Windows.

The main advantage though, for me, is that this is not "unauthorized third party software" to the extent it comes with Windows and the SDK download comes from Microsoft's Akamai account.



Afaik SUA is pretty much dead, so do not carry too much hope in seeing improvements for it.


I just download GnuWin which gives you most Unix tools compiled natively for Win32. Includes OpenSSH too.

http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/


from the look of the website, GnuWin is terribly out of date and packages like OpenSSL (I don't seen OpenSSH listed) will have lots of known security vulnerabilities..


SUA was deprecated in Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8, and MS actually recommends using cygwin or mingw as alternatives to it.


I will keep using it as long as it is there.

I hate using Windows and I have never been one to follow MS "recomendations". Are you kidding? I do not work in an IT department.

I used MSYS and Cygwin for many years. Now I use SUA.

The less I have to use Windows the better. It dulls the mind.


When I am forced to use Windows, I immediately download Cygwin.

I am almost tempted to congratulate Microsoft and welcome them to 1995, although I am quite sure Cygwin didn't have ssh back then.




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