UWIN is a

computer A computer is a machine that can be Computer programming, programmed to automatically Execution (computing), carry out sequences of arithmetic or logical operations (''computation''). Modern digital electronic computers can perform generic set ...

software Software consists of computer programs that instruct the Execution (computing), execution of a computer. Software also includes design documents and specifications. The history of software is closely tied to the development of digital comput ...

package created by David Korn which allows programs written for the

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...

Unix Unix (, ; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multi-user computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, a ...

to be built and run on

Microsoft Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

with few, if any, changes. Some of the software development was subcontracted to Wipro, India. References, correct or not, to the software as U/Win and AT&T Unix for Windows can be found in some cases, especially from the early days of its existence. UWIN source is available under the

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...

Eclipse Public License 1.0 at AT&T'sbr>ASTUWIN
repositories on GitHub. UWIN 5 is distributed with the FireCMD enhanced Windows shell with the Korn Shell thereof as one of three default shells present at install, the others being the FireCMD scripting language and the default Windows command shell cmd.exe. Other UWIN shells like csh and tclsh and those of other interoperability suites like the MKS Toolkit and other shells like those that come with Tcl, Lua, Python and

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distributions inter alia can be added to the menu by the user/administrator.

Technical details

Technically, it is an X/Open

library A library is a collection of Book, books, and possibly other Document, materials and Media (communication), media, that is accessible for use by its members and members of allied institutions. Libraries provide physical (hard copies) or electron ...

for the Windows

32-bit In computer architecture, 32-bit computing refers to computer systems with a processor, memory, and other major system components that operate on data in a maximum of 32- bit units. Compared to smaller bit widths, 32-bit computers can perform la ...

application programming interface An application programming interface (API) is a connection between computers or between computer programs. It is a type of software Interface (computing), interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that des ...

(API), called Win32. UWIN contains: * Libraries that emulate a Unix environment by implementing the Unix API * Include files and development tools such as cc(1),

yacc Yacc (Yet Another Compiler-Compiler) is a computer program for the Unix operating system developed by Stephen C. Johnson. It is a lookahead left-to-right rightmost derivation (LALR) parser generator, generating a LALR parser (the part of a co ...

(1), lex(1), and make(1). * ksh(1) (the Korn Shell) and over 250 utilities such as ls(1), sed(1), cp(1),

stty This is a list of the Shell (computing), shell command (computing), commands of the most recent version of the Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX) Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, IEEE Std 1003.1-2024 which is part of t ...

(1), etc. Most of the Unix API is implemented by the POSIX.DLL dynamically loaded (shared) library. Programs linked with POSIX.DLL run under the Win32 subsystem instead of the

POSIX The Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX; ) is a family of standards specified by the IEEE Computer Society for maintaining compatibility between operating systems. POSIX defines application programming interfaces (APIs), along with comm ...

subsystem, so programs can freely intermix Unix and Win32 library calls. A cc(1) command is provided to compile and link programs for UWIN on Windows using traditional Unix build tools such as make(1). The cc(1) command is a front end to the underlying compiler that performs the actual compilation and linking. It can be used with the Microsoft Visual C/ C++ 5.X compiler, the Visual C/C++ 6.X compiler, the Visual C/C++ 7.X compiler, the Digital Mars C/C++ compiler, the Borland C/C++ compiler, and the MinGW compiler. The GNU compiler and development tools are also available for download to UWIN. UWIN runs best on Windows NT/2000/XP/7 with the file system

NTFS NT File System (NTFS) (commonly called ''New Technology File System'') is a proprietary journaling file system developed by Microsoft in the 1990s. It was developed to overcome scalability, security and other limitations with File Allocation Tabl ...

, but can run in degraded mode using

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, and further degraded on Windows 95/98/ME. (See the External link for more details.) A beta version for Windows Vista and 7 is released as UWin 5.0b (June 2011, 17th). On January 19, 2016, it was announced by AT&T that the AST and UWIN source packages were migrated to GitHub.

Notes

References

* David G. Korn (1997
Porting UNIX to Windows NT
USENIX Annual Technical Conference

External links

* * This page still contains some useful documentation.
AST github repositoryUWIN github repository
{{Unix-Windows Interoperability Compatibility layers Free and open source compilers System administration Unix emulators