20201984·Jun 2, 2026
There's also a windows port of busybox if you want something more stable. w64devkit uses it.
https://github.com/rmyorston/busybox-w32
In Coreutils for Windowsrmyorston
busybox-w32
C2015–2026
rmyorston / busybox-w32
busybox-w32
WIN32 native port of BusyBox.
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What it is
WIN32 native port of BusyBox.
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| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
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| 2015 | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2026 (partial) | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
6 sources> How does it compare in terms of performance
I tried rsync for Windows from its "cosmos" pile of binaries (https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/releases/download/3.3.1...), and it was too slow to be usable compared to WSL rsync.
For many other utilities I use Busybox for Windows (https://github.com/rmyorston/busybox-w32) which is well maintained, fast, and its maintainer is also very responsive to bug reports.
In Cosmopolitan v3.5> In my 25 years of writing shell scripts, they've nearly always been for automation on a specific OS where portability is not a concern.
I've written hundreds of scripts for Busybox for Windows (https://github.com/rmyorston/busybox-w32), Linux bash and macOS zsh. POSIX compatibility means a lot.
WRT the specific concerns of arguments: if you are doing something complicated, use Python. ChatGPT writes it better anyway.
In my experience, more complex scripting is reinventing Gradle, Ansible, Terraform, YAML & similar.
In Filenames and pathnames in shell: How to do it correctly (2020)This port of busybox might also suit your needs: https://github.com/rmyorston/busybox-w32
In I want a better shell (2019)This won't be to everyone's taste but if you value 'lightweight' over 'feature-complete' busybox-w32 [1] may be worth a look. It's a port of BusyBox to WIN32, with random code borrowed from GNUlib for stuff that Microsoft omitted.
I maintain the most active fork and got into using it when I ported my last employer's software to Windows. This was originally developed in the early 1990s to run on Unix workstations. For portability it used Bourne shell (not bash) and nawk (not gawk). BusyBox allowed them to bundle a single executable with the Windows version that was adequate to run those scripts.
Some projects use busybox-w32 to allow a Unix-centric build system to work on Windows. Julia, for example, seems to use it just to get echo and printf.
[1] https://github.com/rmyorston/busybox-w32
In Gow - A lightweight alternative to Cygwin