Gnuwin32

This is an alternative to have some GNU applications (e.g. grep, gawk, ls, wget, etc.) in your windows machine without installing cygwin. It is not so powerful as Cygwin but it does the trick to install some applications to run some scripts. For me it has been useful to run some scripts with gawk and wget.
To get it, download from http://getgnuwin32.sourceforge.net/ It will probably redirect you to the download page of sourceforge. I will suggest downloading and installing all the packages instead of installing just the application that you need (e.g. wget). The package manager will then take care of any updates that your applications will need in the future.
After download and run the exec file, it will prompt asking for a destination to decompress the file. You can choose whatever you want. You will need to move it to someplace else later, so a good place may be “My Documents”. To install, follow the instructions. This is just a summary; if you want details you can check the readme file in the package.
1) Configure wget if you are behind a proxy. (use bin\wget.ini)
2) Edit and select your mirror in download.bat
3) If 1 and 2 worked, it will start to download stuff (all the applications pacakes)
4) After finishing the dowload run install.bat. It will start to decompress the packages
5) The following is optional, but I suggest to do it because it will be easy to work with the programs in gnuwin32
6) You will see now a folder “gnuwin32”. Now you can move the entire directory to “C:\Program Files”
7) After moving the entire gnuwin32 run “update-links.bat” to update any orphan link.
8) Copy the folder “Star Menu” inside gnuwin32 to the Start Menu of your windows desktop. When executed the shortcuts inside will automatically start a cmd in the path of gnuwin32.
9) That’s all. Enjoy.

There are some more optional things that you can do. Because I do not use them and they can “mix up” some original windows applications with the same name in the gnu package I will not explain them here. If you want to do it, check the readme file.

Packages in GNUWin32