UWIN

Last updated

UWIN is a computer software package created by David Korn which allows programs written for the operating system Unix to be built and run on Microsoft Windows with few, if any, changes. Some of the software development was subcontracted to Wipro, India. References, correct or not, to the software as U/Win and AT&T Unix for Windows can be found in some cases, especially from the early days of its existence.

Contents

UWIN source is available under the Open Source Eclipse Public License 1.0 at AT&T's AST/UWIN repositories on GitHub.

UWIN 5 is distributed with the FireCMD enhanced Windows shell with the Korn Shell thereof as one of three default shells present at install, the others being the FireCMD scripting language and the default Windows command shell cmd.exe. Other UWIN shells like csh and tclsh and those of other interoperability suites like the MKS Toolkit and other shells like those that come with Tcl, Lua, Python and Ruby distributions inter alia can be added to the menu by the user/administrator. [1]

Technical details

Technically, it is an X/Open library for the Windows 32-bit application programming interface (API), called Win32. UWIN contains:

Most of the Unix API is implemented by the POSIX.DLL dynamically loaded (shared) library. Programs linked with POSIX.DLL run under the Win32 subsystem instead of the POSIX subsystem, so programs can freely intermix Unix and Win32 library calls. A cc(1) command is provided to compile and link programs for UWIN on Windows using traditional Unix build tools such as make(1). The cc(1) command is a front end to the underlying compiler that performs the actual compilation and linking. It can be used with the Microsoft Visual C/C++ 5.X compiler, the Visual C/C++ 6.X compiler, the Visual C/C++ 7.X compiler, the Digital Mars C/C++ compiler, the Borland C/C++ compiler, and the MinGW compiler. The GNU compiler and development tools are also available for download to UWIN.

UWIN runs best on Windows NT/2000/XP/7 with the file system NTFS, but can run in degraded mode using FAT, and further degraded on Windows 95/98/ME. (See the External link for more details.) A beta version for Windows Vista and 7 is released as UWin 5.0b (June 2011, 17th). [2] On January 19, 2016, it was announced by AT&T that the AST and UWIN source packages were migrated to GitHub. [3]

Notes

  1. ↑ "Windows Command Prompt and Console Alternative". www.brainasoft.com.
  2. ↑ UWin 5.0b announcement, archived from the original on March 15, 2012
  3. ↑ new home for AST and UWIN software

Related Research Articles

Bash (Unix shell) GNU replacement for the Bourne shell

Bash is a Unix shell and command language written by Brian Fox for the GNU Project as a free software replacement for the Bourne shell. First released in 1989, it has been used as the default login shell for most Linux distributions. A version is also available for Windows 10 via the Windows Subsystem for Linux. It is also the default user shell in Solaris 11. Bash was also the default shell in all versions of Apple macOS prior to the 2019 release of macOS Catalina, which changed the default shell to zsh, although Bash currently remains available as an alternative shell.

Cygwin Unix subsystem for Windows machines

Cygwin is a POSIX-compatible programming and runtime environment that runs natively on Microsoft Windows. Under Cygwin, source code designed for Unix-like operating systems may be compiled with minimal modification and executed.

KornShell

KornShell (ksh) is a Unix shell which was developed by David Korn at Bell Labs in the early 1980s and announced at USENIX on July 14, 1983. The initial development was based on Bourne shell source code. Other early contributors were Bell Labs developers Mike Veach and Pat Sullivan, who wrote the Emacs and vi-style line editing modes' code, respectively. KornShell is backward-compatible with the Bourne shell and includes many features of the C shell, inspired by the requests of Bell Labs users.

The Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX) is a family of standards specified by the IEEE Computer Society for maintaining compatibility between operating systems. POSIX defines both the system- and user-level application programming interfaces (API), along with command line shells and utility interfaces, for software compatibility (portability) with variants of Unix and other operating systems. POSIX is also a trademark of the IEEE. POSIX is intended to be used by both application and system developers.

Shell script Script written for the shell, or command line interpreter, of an operating system

A shell script is a computer program designed to be run by the Unix shell, a command-line interpreter. The various dialects of shell scripts are considered to be scripting languages. Typical operations performed by shell scripts include file manipulation, program execution, and printing text. A script which sets up the environment, runs the program, and does any necessary cleanup, logging, etc. is called a wrapper.

Wine (software) Windows compatibility software

Wine is a free and open-source compatibility layer that aims to allow application software and computer games developed for Microsoft Windows to run on Unix-like operating systems. Wine also provides a software library, named Winelib, against which developers can compile Windows applications to help port them to Unix-like systems.

The Windows API, informally WinAPI, is Microsoft's core set of application programming interfaces (APIs) available in the Microsoft Windows operating systems. The name Windows API collectively refers to several different platform implementations that are often referred to by their own names ; see the versions section. Almost all Windows programs interact with the Windows API. On the Windows NT line of operating systems, a small number use the Native API.

In software development, Make is a build automation tool that automatically builds executable programs and libraries from source code by reading files called Makefiles which specify how to derive the target program. Though integrated development environments and language-specific compiler features can also be used to manage a build process, Make remains widely used, especially in Unix and Unix-like operating systems.

MinGW, formerly mingw32, is a free and open source software development environment to create Microsoft Windows applications. The development of the MinGW project has been forked with the creation in 2005–2008 of an alternative project called Mingw-w64.

In computer programming, glob patterns specify sets of filenames with wildcard characters. For example, the Unix Bash shell command mv *.txt textfiles/ moves all files with names ending in .txt from the current directory to the directory textfiles. Here, * is a wildcard standing for "any string of characters" and *.txt is a glob pattern. The other common wildcard is the question mark (?), which stands for one character. For example, mv ?.txt shorttextfiles/ will move all files named with a single character followed by .txt from the current directory to directory shorttextfiles, while ??.txt would match all files whose name consists of 2 characters followed by .txt.

POSIX Threads, commonly known as pthreads, is an execution model that exists independently from a language, as well as a parallel execution model. It allows a program to control multiple different flows of work that overlap in time. Each flow of work is referred to as a thread, and creation and control over these flows is achieved by making calls to the POSIX Threads API. POSIX Threads is an API defined by the standard POSIX.1c, Threads extensions .

David Korn (computer scientist) American computer programmer (born 1943)

David G. Korn is an American UNIX programmer and the author of the Korn shell (ksh), a command line interface/programming language.

Interix was an optional, POSIX-conformant Unix subsystem for Windows NT operating systems. Interix was a component of Windows Services for UNIX, and a superset of the Microsoft POSIX subsystem. Like the POSIX subsystem, Interix was an environment subsystem for the NT kernel. It included numerous open source utility software programs and libraries. Interix was originally developed and sold as OpenNT until purchased by Microsoft in 1999.

MKS Toolkit is a software package produced and maintained by PTC that provides a Unix-like environment for scripting, connectivity and porting Unix and Linux software to Microsoft Windows. It was originally created for MS-DOS, and OS/2 versions were released up to version 4.4. Several editions of each version, such as MKS Toolkit for developers, power users, enterprise developers and interoperability are available, with the enterprise developer edition being the most complete.

Microsoft POSIX subsystem is one of four subsystems shipped with the first versions of Windows NT, the other three being the Win32 subsystem which provided the primary API for Windows NT, plus the OS/2 and security subsystems.

Unix-like Operating system that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system

A Unix-like operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, while not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification. A Unix-like application is one that behaves like the corresponding Unix command or shell. There is no standard for defining the term, and some difference of opinion is possible as to the degree to which a given operating system or application is "Unix-like".

EMX is a programming environment for MS-DOS and OS/2. It allows creating and executing of 32-bit mode applications, presenting a POSIX API and, on OS/2, access to the OS/2 APIs.

Mingw-w64 is a free and open source software development environment to create Microsoft Windows PE applications. It was forked in 2005–2008 from MinGW.

References

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.