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These ports of Linux utilities to Windows are typically robust and well-maintained. This would allow you to, for example, ssh from the command line on Windows – as well as using common Linux utilities like grep or cat – without needing another program to provide this functionality. Installing Git on Windows also provides its own bash shell from the MSYS2 project, which shares some functionality and upstream code with Cygwin. Originally, this functionality was provided by the Cygwin project, which includes ports of many other Linux system tools. It is also possible to install these core Linux utilities on Windows, along with a port of the standard bash shell. On other platforms, ssh is just a command-line program that you can run from a terminal, and it is part of a core group of Linux utilities. For this reason, using a dedicated SSH GUI like PuTTY is still a popular way of working with cloud servers from Windows.
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These two features are not usually thought of as analogous on other platforms, but on Windows, it was usually a safe assumption that if you needed a Unix-style terminal, you were going to be working on a remote server, so they were often packaged together. Each of these applications would usually include their own terminal interface, as well as a built-in SSH client for connecting to remote servers. Because of this, users who needed to work on cloud servers from Windows would usually install software like PuTTY (a tty is the historical name of a Unix terminal), mobaXterm, or ConEmu. Neither of these Windows shells include many fundamental features of modern Unix-style shells, and they are generally not well suited to most cloud development. PowerShell provides somewhat more modern syntax relative to cmd.exe (where “modern” in this context means “closer to a modern macOS or Linux shell”), as well as signal handling functions specific to certain Windows software, making it useful for Windows administrators.
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The Command Prompt, also called cmd.exe, uses legacy MS-DOS syntax with relatively few additions.
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Instead, Windows offered two of its own native command line interfaces: the Windows Command Prompt, and from Windows 7 onward, the Microsoft PowerShell. This is because it did not use common command-line terminal interfaces, sometimes called terminal emulators because they emulate the interfaces of older non-graphical computers. It also lacked special features for highlighting text, opening multiple tabs, and so on. Historically, Windows did not use Unix-style command line shells, such as bash, which have been ubiquitous on macOS and Linux since the early 2000s. On Windows, there are many choices for a Terminal equivalent. Improving your Windows Terminal Experience If you are using macOS or Linux, you can skip to the following section. Because getting started with a terminal on Windows can be less intuitive than other platforms, the first section of this tutorial will cover Windows terminal environments.
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