UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I tried opening the windows command line and typing UNIX commands, but they don't work. It kept saying that it was not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file.

Moderator's Comments:

Removed strange sentence with even stranger link

I need to use UNIX commands such as 'less', ‘grep’, ‘cat’, ‘cut’, ‘awk’, and ‘sed’

I've heard that Cygwin can also be useful in this, if so could anyone offer directions on how to install and use that?

Thanks again for helping a very new person to this.

Download executable from this link Cygwin Information and Installation

Installation is pretty simple

If you used that weird "tutorial" I hardly think it would work...

You can download cygwin and use coreutils... The installation is pretty straightforward.

I'm not a fan of Cygwin's path referencing, but whereas UWIN is more UNIX-like it's been a little sketchy under later Windows versions. If you're hand-cuffed to Windows, you could try the UNIX Tools here: Native Win32 ports of some GNU utilities.

z.I. I removed the link. It seemed to be something about baseball and nothing to do with a tutorial. Maybe my router is on the blink!

Honestly, I'm still pretty lost about everything. I installed Cygwin, and I opened it up and I try and type Unix commands like '% ls' and it keeps saying "bash: fg: %: no such job"

I'm thinking there's an easy fix to this, but I am really new to UNIX commands and writing on the command line in general. I just started learning yesterday so please bear with me.

Ah. You're not supposed to type the % character, that's just there to demonstrate that you're at a shell prompt.

You'll also see

Code:

# ls
$ ls

etc.

The command is

Code:

ls