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

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: 176 commands, 1,924 options — with ongoing differential testing against a GNU coreutils 9.7 oracle (178 cases, 165 pass, 13 tracked platform diffs).

¹ 1,924 = OPTION( macro count in src/commands/. Command count excludes the internal wpm manager and the [ bracket alias of test. Differential corpus: 178 cases across 84 commands (165 pass / 13 known platform diffs, tests/differential/baseline.json). See the GNU comparison report.

# 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

• 🪟 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 — 2,742 unit tests, plus a 178-case differential suite byte-compared against authoritative upstream sources (GNU coreutils 9.7, findutils 4.10.0, grep 3.12, sed 4.9, patch 2.7.6, util-linux 2.41, procps-ng 4.0.4). Every command audited line-by-line; reports in tests/differential/audit-*.md.
• ⚡ Small, fast, PGO-built — 3.79 MB for 176 commands, statically linked, zero dependencies, ~19 ms cold start. Published x64 binaries are Profile-Guided Optimization builds trained on real workloads (sort −18%, nl −17% vs the same code without PGO). Methodology and data: docs/performance-roadmap.md.

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 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.

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

• 2,420 automated unit tests — 99.6% pass rate
• Differential corpus: 178 test cases (131 corpus + 47 regressions, covering 84 commands), executed against a GNU coreutils 9.7 oracle with identical inputs — 165 pass / 13 tracked diffs (93%), machine-checked in tests/differential/baseline.json
• Automated GNU comparison: scripts/compare_outputs.sh and gnu_comparison_tests.sh; per-case runner: tests/differential/runner.sh

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.

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

Profile-Guided Optimization (x64): release CI builds the published x64 binary with PGO automatically — instrumented build, training workloads, then an /USEPROFILE relink. To reproduce locally:

./scripts/build-pgo.ps1          # -> build-pgo/usr/bin/winuxcmd.exe

Training workloads (scripts/pgo-train.sh) are ported from uutils/coreutils' build-pgo.sh, so profiles stay machine-independent. ARM64 builds are not PGO'd: profile collection must run on the target architecture.

Contributions welcome — see CONTRIBUTING.md.

MIT — see LICENSE.