Gow (Gnu On Windows) is the lightweight alternative to Cygwin. It uses a convenient Windows installer that installs about 130 extremely useful open source UNIX applications compiled as native win32 binaries. It is designed to be as small as possible, about 10 MB, as opposed to Cygwin which can run well over 100 MB depending upon options.
Be careful with some tools in this collection due to their age. See below.
Included Tools (bold = Original parent package or single tools):
● Bash | ● bc: bc,dc | ● bison | ● bzip2: bzip2, bunzip2, bzip2recover
● Coreutils: basename, cat, chgrp, chmod, chown, chroot, cksum, cp, csplit, cut, dd, df, dirname, du, env, expand, expr, factor, fmt, fold, gsort, head, hostid, hostname, id, install, join, ln, ls, md5sum, mkdir, mkfifo, mknod, mv, nl, od, paste, pathchk, pr, printenv, printf, pwd, rm, rmdir, seq, sha1sum, sleep, split, sum, sync, tac, tail, tee, test, touch, tr, uname, unexpand, uniq, unlink, wc, whoami, yes
● Diffutils: diff, diff3, sdiff | ● dos2unix (Clem Dye): dos2unix, unix2dos | ● Findutils: gfind (renamed find), xargs | ● flex
● gawk: available under the names: awk, gawk | ● grep: grep, egrep, fgrep | ● gsar | ● gzip | ● indent | ● jwhois
● less: less, lesskey | ● m4 | ● make | ● nano | ● patch | ● sed
● Sharutils: shar, unshar, uudecode, uuencode | ● tar | ● util-linux: su | ● vim | ● whereis | ● which
Ignored due to vulnerability risks:
● curl
● Wget
● ncftp
● PuTTY: pageant, plink, pscp, psftp, putty, puttygen, "scp", "sftp", "ssh". The last three are not the named utilities but just renamed PuTTY tools.
● UnRAR
● Info-ZIP's Zip