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Friday, August 11, 2017

Using Gow (GNU on Windows)

If you are familiar with the powerful command-line utilities available on Linux platforms, then you also know those utilities do not come with Windows.

An alternative to Cygwin, Gow is a lightweight Win32 library of over 100 extremely useful open source Linux tools. And it is easy to download and install on your Windows machine.

Gow on GitHub

Download and Install Gow

  1. Go to the Gow downloads page and click on Gow-0.8.0.exe to download the installer
  2. Open File Explorer -> Go to Downloads -> Execute Gow-0.8.0.exe to install
  3. Take all defaults which will install Gow under C:\Program Files (x86)\Gow

Configure Gow

Now you have to tell Windows where to find Gow so that you can use all of its utilities from the Command Line.
  1. Open Control Panel -> System and Security -> System
  2. Click on Advanced system settings
  3. Click the Environment Variables button
  1. In the User variables section, you have to add Gow to the Path variable by clicking Edit
    • If you don't already have a Path variable here, create one by clicking New
  1. Click New and then place C:\Program Files (x86)\Gow\bin as the path to the Gow utilities
  2. Click OK all the way out to save changes
That's it! Open a Command Prompt and enjoy all the goodness Gow provides!