Real Unix commands. Real Windows paths. One ~3 MB executable. No WSL · No Cygwin · No MSYS2 · No path-translation pain v1.0.0 stable is out. 🎉

💾 Install · ⚡ Demo · 🐂 niubash · 📦 WPM · 🆚 Compare · 📚 Docs · 中文

---

The problem, in one sentence

You're on Windows and you need grep -rn, sed -i, find -exec, xargs -0 — and every option so far is a compromise:

• WSL — 1 GB+ install, and a VM filesystem boundary between you and your files
• Cygwin — path-translation gymnastics and a 2–5 s startup
• GnuWin32 — abandoned in 2012, stuck at 60% compatibility
• uutils — a great Rust project, but ~100 commands and ~600 options

WinuxCmd skips the compromise. A single native Win32 executable that speaks GNU syntax on Windows paths: 169 commands, 1,855 options — with ongoing differential testing against GNU Coreutils 9.11 (43 cases, 35 pass, 8 known gaps tracked in issue-140).

169	1,855	43 cases	2,346	~3 MB
commands	options¹	GNU diff tests · 81% pass	tests · 99.6% pass	zero-dependency binary

¹ 1,855 = OPTION( macro count in src/commands/. Differential corpus: 43 cases across ~35 commands, 35 pass / 8 known gaps (issue-140). See the GNU comparison report.

---

⚡ Unix muscle memory on Windows

# Every GNU flag you know, on real Windows paths
ls -la
grep -rn "TODO" src/
sed -i 's/http:/https:/g' config.ini
find . -name "*.tmp" -exec rm {} \;

# Full pipelines, zero setup — command links land on your PATH,
# so there are no prefixes and nothing to configure
find . -name "*.cpp" -print0 | xargs -0 wc -l

# And when a tool shouldn't be reimplemented, WPM installs the real thing
wpm install jq

💾 Install

Installer (recommended)	Grab WinuxCmd-<version>-x64-setup.exe (or the ARM64 setup) from GitHub Releases
Portable	Unzip WinuxCmd-<version>-win-x64.zip anywhere and add it to your PATH
Build from source	VS 2022 + CMake 3.30 + Ninja — see Building from source

🚀 Why WinuxCmd

• 🪟 Native, not emulated — talks to Win32 APIs directly. Understands C:\, UNC paths and NTFS ACLs (with cygpath and getfacl for bridging). No VM, no runtime DLLs, instant startup.
• 🧠 GNU where it counts — find alone implements 88 options (full expression parser, -exec/-execdir/-ok, -printf); grep ships PCRE2; sed supports in-place -i editing.
• 📦 WPM built in — a package manager for the tools that shouldn't be reimplemented: jq, ripgrep, fd, fzf, bat, make, neovim, curl, wget…
• 🧪 Tested like it matters — 2,346 unit tests across 178 test files (99.6% pass), plus differential output testing against GNU Coreutils 9.11 (43 cases, 81% pass, 8 known gaps tracked in issue-140).
• ⚡ Small and fast — ~3 MB, zero dependencies, instant startup (Cygwin takes 2–5 s just to boot).

🐂 Better together: the niubash shell

WinuxCmd gives Windows real Unix commands. niubash gives them a real bash language to live in — the same unixwin org, two halves of one workflow:

# In niubash (native bash on Windows — no WSL):
for f in *.log; do
  grep -c ERROR "$f" | xargs -I{} echo "$f: {} errors"
done | sort -t: -k2 -rn | head -5

• Real bash semantics — if/for/functions/arrays/pipelines run on niubash, powered by its rubash engine, green across the GNU Bash upstream test suite (86/86).
• Agent-friendly — niu -c is quiet and deterministic: no banners, stable stdout/stderr, exact exit codes. The shell your AI tooling already speaks.
• Zero glue — niubash injects WinuxCmd's command links onto the PATH at startup, so grep, sed and find above are the real binaries you're looking at right now.

Ship WinuxCmd alone in a 3 MB exe, or drop in niubash (v1.0.0) and get the whole bash workflow.

📦 WPM package manager

wpm install jq          # JSON processor
wpm install goawk       # awk implementation
wpm install bsdtar      # BSD tar
wpm install openssh     # SSH client
wpm install make        # GNU make
wpm install neovim      # text editor
wpm install curl        # URL transfer
wpm install wget        # network downloader

wpm search json         # discover packages
wpm list --all          # see what's installed

Details in the WPM User Guide.

🆚 How it compares

Feature	WinuxCmd	uutils (Rust)	GnuWin32	Cygwin	busybox
Commands	169	~100	~90	~200	~300
Options	1,855	~600	~200	Full	~500
GNU compat	81% diff pass	95%	60%	99%	70%
Native Win32	✅	❌	✅	❌	❌
Package manager	✅ WPM	❌	❌	apt-cyg	❌
Test cases	2,346	~2,000	0	—	~100
Binary size	~3 MB	~5 MB	—	1 GB+	—
Startup	Instant	Instant	—	2–5 s	—
Maintained	✅ 2026	✅	❌ since 2012	✅	❌

Deep dive: vs uutils / GnuWin32 / Cygwin

vs uutils/coreutils (Rust)

Aspect	WinuxCmd	uutils
Language	C++23	Rust
Commands	169	~100
Options	1,855	~600
Binary size	~3 MB	~5 MB
Dependencies	None	Rust runtime
Build time	2 min	15 min
Package manager	WPM built-in	None

vs GnuWin32

Aspect	WinuxCmd	GnuWin32
Maintenance	Active	Abandoned
Last update	2026	2012
Windows support	Win10/11	WinXP+
Modern toolchain	C++23, CMake	C, autotools

vs Cygwin

Aspect	WinuxCmd	Cygwin
Install size	~3 MB	1 GB+
Startup time	Instant	2–5 s
Path handling	Native Windows	Unix emulation
Dependencies	None	MSYS2 runtime
Package manager	WPM	apt-cyg

🧰 Command coverage

169 commands — full coverage table (click to expand)

GNU Coreutils (83 commands)

Category	Commands	Differential status
File Ops	cp, mv, rm, ln, install, mkdir, rmdir, touch, unlink	✅ mostly verified; cp has 9+ options rejected on Windows (issue-140)
Text Processing	cat, echo, head, tail, sort, uniq, cut, tr, wc, fold, fmt, join, comm	✅ diff PASS except fmt (OUT_DIFF, issue-140)
Directory Listing	ls, dir, vdir	✅ ls PASS; dir Windows-columnar by design
Search	find, xargs	✅
Crypto/Hash	base64, base32, basenc, md5sum, sha1sum, sha256sum, sha384sum, sha512sum, b2sum, cksum, sum	✅
Date/Time	date, touch, time, timeout	✅
System Info	uname, hostname, id, whoami, users, groups, nproc, uptime, arch	⚠️ whoami/users/groups thin stubs (≤1 declared option each)
Disk	df, du, stat	⚠️ stat deep-path gap (OUT_DIFF, issue-140)
Env/Expr	env, printenv, expr, seq, yes, true, false	✅
Text Format	pr, nl, expand, unexpand, column, paste, tsort, ptx	⚠️ tsort and ptx output-format gaps (OUT_DIFF, issue-140)
File Info	file, stat, readlink, realpath, dirname, basename, pathchk, sync	⚠️ stat deep-path; file no-magic stub
Process	nice, nohup, stdbuf	⚠️ nice thin (1 option); stdbuf EXIT_DIFF (issue-140)
Permissions	chmod, chown, chgrp, chroot	⚠️ Linux ownership/SELinux options rejected on Windows
Other	shred, factor, kill, truncate, fmt, numfmt, mktemp, dircolors, sum, csplit, split	⚠️ fmt OUT_DIFF gap

GNU findutils/grep/sed (3 commands)

Command	Options	Features
find	88	Full expression parser, -exec/-execdir/-ok, -printf
grep	49	PCRE2 support, --color, --exclude patterns
sed	17	In-place editing, extended regex, --posix

BSD tools (15 commands)

cal, column, hexdump, logger, tree, less, more, strings, rev, tsort, seq, sleep, nohup, watch, tput

Process management (13 commands)

ps, top, kill, killall, pgrep, pkill, pidof, pldd, free, uptime, renice, stdbuf, timeout

Cygwin/MSYS2 (14 commands)

cygpath, dos2unix, unix2dos, d2u, u2d

System info (16 commands)

hostname, id, who, pinky, stty, infocmp, tic, toe, locale, tput, getconf, getfacl, ldd, lsof, file, man

Custom extensions (10+ commands)

wpm (package manager), mpicalc, regtool, mkpasswd, mkgroup, mkfifo, mknod, clear, reset, tzset

🏃 Benchmarks

Test	WinuxCmd	uutils	GNU (WSL2)
cat (100 MB)	0.8 s	0.9 s	0.7 s
sort (1M lines)	2.1 s	2.3 s	1.9 s
grep (100 MB)	1.2 s	1.1 s	1.0 s
find (10K files)	0.3 s	0.4 s	0.2 s

Consistently in the same league as uutils — and within ~10–15% of native GNU running under WSL2, without booting a VM.

Benchmark environment: Windows 11, Intel i7-13700K, 32 GB RAM, NVMe SSD

🧪 Testing and GNU verification

• 2,346 automated test cases across 178 test files — 99.6% pass rate
• Differential corpus: 99 test cases (3 corpus + 43 regressions + 53 expansion cases, covering 71 commands), executed against GNU Coreutils 9.4 (WSL2) with identical inputs — 95 pass / 4 whitelisted platform-environment differences, verified on the current build (2026-09)
• Automated GNU comparison: scripts/compare_outputs.sh and gnu_comparison_tests.sh; per-case runner: tests/differential/runner.sh

Whitelisted	Command	Reason
21	id -g	platform: Windows has no POSIX gid; prints primary-group RID (197121)
23	cp -l	environment: hardlinks across \\wsl.localhost 9p unsupported in the WSL-side runner; verified on native NTFS
35	ln -hard	environment: same 9p hardlink limitation as cp -l
30	mkdir exists	format: GNU uses locale-dependent curly quotes (U+2018/2019); winuxcmd uses ASCII '

The eight former issue-140 gaps (dd, diff -u, tsort, fmt, stat, sdiff, ptx, stdbuf) all pass; normal-format diff hunk-header, hash-family separator, cksum line-ending, realpath forward-slash, and od -c octal-escaping gaps were all found and fixed in 2026-09.

See the GNU Comparison Report.

📚 Documentation

Document	Description
Compatibility Matrix	Support status of all 169 commands
GNU Comparison Report	Differential testing vs GNU Coreutils 9.4
Windows Features	Windows-specific behavior
WPM Guide	Package manager user guide
GNU Test Baseline	GNU test framework

🛠️ Building from source

Prerequisites: Visual Studio 2022+ · CMake 3.30+ · Ninja

# Build
./scripts/build-with-vs.ps1

# Run tests
./scripts/build-with-vs.ps1 -Target winuxcmd-tests
build-vs/tests/winuxcmd-tests.exe

🤝 Contributing

Contributions welcome — see CONTRIBUTING.md.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.

---

WinuxCmd — because ls shouldn't require a Linux kernel. Pair it with niubash — the native bash shell that speaks GNU fluently on Windows.

⬆ Back to top