Unix Utils for Windows

I work with unix operating systems quite a bit. So when I'm using Windows I'm often missing some of the handy little command line unix tools that are ubiquitous to unix but no where to be found on Windows.

Just today I was wanting to use the GNU find utility. The find command on unix lists all the files in a directory recursively. Its really handy because if you need to find out where a file is you just type find /path | fgrep search.file. One thing that frustrates me about the Windows search is that you have to search an entire drive - if I know the file I am looking for is in c:\windows why should I have to search the entire c:\ drive?

So I came across some Native Win32 Ports of some GNU utilities: unxutils.sourceforge.net, such as find, grep (as well as fgrep, and egrep). These are nice because you can run them right from the windows command line, so no need to run in an emulator like cygwin.

One thing you need to keep in mind is that some of these utilities might have the same name as some windows utilities, you probably better off renaming these in the case of conflict. For instance Windows comes with a program called find.exe that searches for text inside a file, so I renamed the GNU find to xfind.exe.