Get Linux/Unix command lines for Windows

Sometimes the windows command line just isn't good enough, and instead of dir you want ls, or you want to count the number of lines in a file with a wc -l or grep for something. Cygwin is great and all, but it is a bit of overkill for most of my situations. UnxUtils.zip contains all of the above and more, and all the tools are accessible from the windows command line!

The official site's download link is down at the time of posting, but I have found a number of unofficial mirrors:

ftp://81.30.199.66/pub/windows/unixutils/UnxUtils.zip
ftp://ftp.ufanet.ru/pub/windows/unixutils/UnxUtils.zip
ftp://193.40.239.25/pub/windows/msutils/UnxUtils.zip
ftp://194.226.230.170/pub/windows/devel/UnxUtils.zip
http://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/ftp.locustworld.com/UnxUtils.zip

Once you have downloaded and unzipped into a directory you need to add them to your windows path, so that when you type ls your computer knows where to find it.

• Right click "My Computer" then click properties
• In the "System Properties" window click the advanced tab
• Click the "Environment Variables" button
• Click the "PATH" variable and click edit
• Add a semicolon to the end of the "Variable value" field and then type in the location you unzipped UnxUtils.zip to followed by \usr\local\wbin
  

To test your new utilities open up a command prompt (you can find it hiding in Start->Programs->Accessories->Command Prompt) and try one out! The standard UnxUtils contains the following tools:

(this list generated by typing ls *.exe | sed -e "s/\.exe//g" > utils.txt from within the wbin directory - from a windows command prompt!)

agrep ansi2knr basename bc bison bunzip2 bzip2 bzip2recover cat chgrp chmod chown cksum cmp comm compress cp csplit cut date dc dd df diff diff3 dircolors dirname du echo egrep env expand expr factor fgrep find flex fmt fold fsplit

gawk gclip gplay grep gsar gunzip gzip head id indent install join jwhois less lesskey ln logname ls m4 make makedepend makemsg man md5sum mkdir mkfifo mknod mv mvdir nl od paste patch pathchk pclip pr printenv printf pwd

recode rm rman rmdir sdiff sed seq shar sleep sort split stego su sum sync tac tail tar tee test touch tr type uname unexpand uniq unrar unshar unzip uudecode uuencode wc wget which whoami xargs yes zcat zip

Run X11 Applications Remotely

Sometimes you want to run a graphical application on a Linux box that is headless, but you don't want to go to the bother of connecting up a keyboard, mouse and monitor. The Linux graphics system X11 is great for this as it doesn't care where you are, as long as it is knows where to connect and is authorised to do so. Here is how I run X11 applications locally on Mac OSX or Linux:

First off, I start the X server. On OSX that means installing and running the application; on Linux I'm usually already in a graphical mode so it is already running. On the local computer (the one I'm sitting at) I run:

$ xauth list
Ari.local/unix:0 MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1 7b246eec9fc9d493fc009dd4ea2b8b8a
10.0.0.9:0 MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1 7b246eec9fc9d493fc009dd4ea2b8b8a
localhost:0 MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1 7b246eec9fc9d493fc009dd4ea2b8b8a

The line in the middle is the one of interest; it is the inet domain line. Copy that line. On the remote computer (via ssh) I run

$ export DISPLAY=10.0.0.9:0
$ xauth add 10.0.0.9:0 MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1 7b246eec9fc9d493fc009dd4ea2b8b8a

That second line is mostly a copy-paste job. Once all this has been configured, X11 should now run lovely.

Howto: get Azureus to start at boot and run headless (ie without a gui) on Linux

Getting Azureus to start at boot headless saves system resources and means it will work away nicely in the background. This approach works great with a web front-end like the Azureus Swing UI. To get the most out of bittorrent, you also need to make sure that it shuts down properly. Here are the steps I used to set it up...

Install and configure Azureus

• Download Azureus and decompress it into a directory
• Download log4j.jar and commons-cli.jar and put them in the directory you uncompressed Azureus into
• Run Azureus by opening a terminal, changing into the directory you put Azureus and typing
  

./azureus

• Configure Azureus with the GUI tool
• Exit Azureus
• Create a file called headless.sh with the following in it:

#!/bin/bash
java -jar Azureus2.jar --ui=console >/dev/null 2>&1

• Make that file executable by typing
  

chmod u+x headless.sh

• Create a file called azureus_rcscript with the following in it: (you need to change the AZ_USER and DIR variables to represent the name of the user who will be running Azureus and the directory Azureus is installed to)
  

#! /bin/sh
#rc script for Azureus by Phill - http://phillstechstuff.blogspot.com
#Based on script from Azureus wiki - http://www.azureuswiki.com/index.php/HeadlessSwingUIAtBoot

#The user that will run Azureus
AZ_USER=user

#your path to the azureus directory, where Azureus2.jar is located
DIR=/home/user/azureus

#executable files in the following paths that are perhaps needed by the script
PATH=/bin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/usr/sbin

#Description
DESC="Azureus daemon"

case "$1" in
start)
if [[ ` ps -ef | grep "java -jar Azureus2.jar --ui=console"|grep -v grep` ]]
then
echo "Azureus is already running!"
else
echo "Starting $DESC"
su $AZ_USER -c "cd $DIR; ./headless.sh"
fi
;;
stop)
if [[ ` ps -ef | grep "java -jar Azureus2.jar --ui=console"|grep -v grep` ]]
then
echo -n "Stopping $DESC"
su $AZ_USER -c "kill `ps -ef | grep "java -jar Azureus2.jar" | grep -v grep | awk '{print $2}'`"
echo " ... done."
else
echo "Coulnd't find a running $DESC"
fi
;;
restart)
if [[ ` ps -ef | grep "java -jar Azureus2.jar --ui=console"|grep -v grep` ]]
then
echo -n "Stopping $DESC"
su $AZ_USER -c "kill `ps -ef | grep "java -jar Azureus2.jar" | grep -v grep | awk '{print $2}'`"
echo " ... done."
else
echo "Coulnd't find a running $DESC"
fi
echo "Starting $DESC: $NAME"
su $AZ_USER -c "cd $DIR; ./headless.sh"
echo " ... done."
;;
status)
if [[ ` ps -ef | grep "java -jar Azureus2.jar --ui=console"|grep -v grep` ]]
then
echo "Azureus is RUNNING"
else
echo "Azureus is DOWN"
fi
;;
*)
echo "Usage: $0 {start|stop|status|restart}"
exit 1
;;
esac

exit 0

• Put that file inside the startup for the runlevel your machine runs at. For my machine, that is runlevel 5, and it is probably the same for yours if it boots up to a graphical environment. I did this by typing

su
mv azureus_rcscript.sh /etc/rc5.d/S99azureus_rcscript.sh
cp /etc/rc5.d/S99azureus_rcscript.sh /etc/rc5.d/K01azureus_rcscript.sh
chmod 755 /etc/rc5.d/S99azureus_rcscript.sh /etc/rc5.d/S99azureus_rcscript.sh

• The S99 makes it run this script after everything else has started up, which is good as it makes sure it won't try to run before things like network services have started. As the script also includes functionality to shut down Azureus, I copied it to have it run when we leave runlevel 5, which usually means shutdown time. The K01 means to run it before shutting down any other processes
  

That's it! If you reboot you should now have Azureus running in headless mode, and shutting down cleanly when you shutdown the system.

Please let me know if this works for you, and if you have any questions!