Product Reviews
Bringing Unix to Windows
Leverage the skills of Unix administrtors with
these utilities brought to WinNT/2000.</span>
- By Charles Aulds
- 07/01/2000
MKS Toolkit is aptly named, as it’s primarily an impressive
collection of Unix command-line utilities or tools. The product brings to Windows
NT or 2000 the same strong command-line and scripting capabilities that Unix
administrators already know. Most of the product consists of native Win32 ports
of approximately 250 common Unix utilities. These are designed to work exactly
like their Unix counterparts. I was pleased to see that these are small, portable,
and don’t require a supporting DLL to furnish a Unix-to-Win32 translation layer.
The array of Unix programs that MKS Toolkit brings to Windows
is well documented, and already familiar to most administrators and programmers
transitioning from Unix to Windows. Although the two Unix shells provided (sh
and csh) are complete, I chose not to use them. After all, we’re discussing
Windows NT/2000 here, and we might as well learn to rely on the system-user
interfaces that Microsoft provides. The tools in the MKS Toolkit function well
in NT/2000 batch files, although hard-core Unix users may prefer to write shell
scripts that run under a Unix-like shell. Perl version 5.004 is packaged with
MKS Toolkit and provides another powerful Win32 scripting language. With support
for OLE/COM automation and the ISAPI IIS interface, Perl is right at home on
Windows NT/2000.
Even though MKS Toolkit is primarily geared toward command-line
use, it does contain a few Windows utilities. The two utilities used for scheduling
tasks in Windows (ala cron) are nothing to be particularly excited about, but
two other Windows programs in the Toolkit are absolute delights. One is Visual
Pax, a tremendous tool for working with archives, whether they are stored in
disk files or on tape media. The utility supports the creation of tar, cpio,
and cpiob archives on multiple volumes (like a series of floppies), and can
decompress archives that have been “gzipped.” The tree-view of the archive,
with the ability to add and delete files by clicking and selecting, is of tremendous
value. For die-hard Unix types, command-line versions of tar and cpio are still
available as part of the Toolkit.
If you’re adept at using vi on Unix, you should definitely
give Visual VI a try. It supports all the vi keystrokes and regular expressions
I can think of. With only a 60K “price” to pay over the character version, you
also get the benefits of the standard Windows menu bar (File->Open, etc.), and
more important, the ability to highlight text and use the clipboard cut, copy,
and paste operations.
The bottom line: Although pricey, the latest version of MKS
Toolkit (version 6.2a) is excellent and worth the price for any company that
wants to leverage the skills of Unix administrators. The product comes with
a rich set of documentation, available as Windows Help files, traditional MAN
pages (for you hard-core Unix types), and online HTML documentation. By combining
ActiveState Perl and MKS Toolkit 6.2, you can tremendously extend the functionality
of NT, not only at the command prompt, but also in script or batch files.
About the Author
Charles Aulds, MCSE, MCP+I, a programmer/analyst with Epic Data, Connectware Products Group, develops bar code data collection middleware.