I had to monitor some machines from a windows environment. As I love to script anything I decided to play the game with bash…so my battleplan was:

1. – install a small *nix environment on my Windows vm;
2. – set a nice, resizable terminal  window (putty sucks);
3. – write my script.

Since I’m an old experienced Cygwin user, I decided to use a lighter tool. Minimalistic Gnu for Windows was a nice pick. Now I love it! Install it from here http://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw/files/Installer/mingw-get-inst/

After you set it up – it’s easy – open the mingw terminal window, that still uses the #cmd console window, and you’ll get a nice bash shell!

As #cmd window is really ugly, you can install the MinGW Terminal issuing

# mingw-get install mintty

Then you just have to change the MinGW link on your desktop, telling it to use the mintty terminal”–mintty”

c:\mingw\msys\1.0\msys.bat –mintty

Now you have a working gnu enviroment. You can install new software with #mingw-get and forget putty, using our old beloved ssh