Cygwin alternate for windows?

Here's a few alternatives:

• PowerShell
• UnixUtils
• Microsoft Windows Services for Unix

Out of those, perhaps UnixUtils might serve you best.

MSYS - http://www.mingw.org/wiki/msys

Quite usable, and as long as you have the "bin" directory of MSYS in %PATH%, you can use many of the unix commands from within cmd.exe.

You can even quickly switch to bash from within cmd.exe when you need to.

UnixUtils

• http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/