Is this possible?

[Shadow Skill]

Would it be possible to create an interpereter for windows CLI that would function just like bash? Basically a terminal emulator that allows one to use bash style commands to interact with windows from the command line..I think it would be interesting to see a transparent terminal running in windows that people familliar with Linux could fire up and use right away without having to attempt to learn different syntax. The only major difference would hopefully lie in the fact that windows is mostly case insensitive.

Can it even be done theoratically?

[RedFedora]

Since Windows has pipes, re-direction and multi-processing, I suppoe you could do that.
The trick would probably be handling the and/or syntax for multiple commands on one
line. I did try this once in a DOS environment and it worked fairly well...

I'm told cyrwin (spelling?) handles this fairly well.

[ghaefb]

Yes cygwin can do the job
http://www.cygwin.com

[Shadow Skill]

Cygwin seems a bit much for what I want, I'm not looking for an entire Linux emulator, I actually tried Cygwin once and it didn't work out...

[Chas.H]

If you are talking about stringing a load of DOS commands together and running them in one go I think writing batch file scripts (*.bat) might be all you need.

[Shadow Skill]

No that isn't what I mean, I want a frontend so to speak for the windows CLI that uses bash syntax to issue commands instead of windows CLI syntax which seems to be a near lost art.

[taylor65]

I did this a while back (like 5 years ago). I don't remember what program it was, but I just ran a program in windows, and it opened a dos-like window that had all the unix type commands, like ls, awk, etc.

[kosmosik]

Originally Posted by Shadow Skill

Cygwin seems a bit much for what I want, I'm not looking for an entire Linux emulator, I actually tried Cygwin once and it didn't work out...

CygWin is by no way an emulator... what you need is basically CygWin with bash (there are also other ports of bash for win32 aviable, also zsh). but keep in mind that it will not behave like bash on Linux distribution... Windows has totally different architecture.

you can also check out Microsoft Services For Unix - it should have command interpreter such as bash... it is build on Interix layer.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/sfu/

[Shadow Skill]

Well I am downloading sfu right now, and plan on poking around in the X11 port to see what that is like...I wonder if I should even attempt to run gnome in it with only 768 ram......I also hope they made installing bash very simple sfu seems to default to korn which I have no idea how to use....Time to check the sfu forums.

Kos if Cygwin isn't an emulator just what is it then?

[Jman]

Cyrgwin is a Linux environment for Windows. Kind of like Wine is Windows on Linux, but not really.

You could get Linux with bash running with colinux.