Mysys - A Guide to Installing Mingw-W64
The free program mysys is a great way to integrate a host of standard Unix commands and programs into any modern Windows computer. It’s not quite as powerful as a full Linux installation, but it’s definitely a very useful tool for anyone who works on a Windows computer and wants some more than just the limited tools provided by Microsoft. After downloading the installer (which has checksums to ensure it’s valid), run it and follow the instructions on the screen. When the installation is complete, you’ll find a Mingw-w64 folder in your C:msys32 or C:msys64 directory depending on the operating system version you chose during the installation. In your Start Menu, you’ll also find a shortcut to launch the Mingw-w64 shell.
With this, you can use a host of different command line programs that would otherwise be inaccessible from Windows (and even the Windows Command Prompt). For example, Git and GNU Octave are built using the Mingw-w64 compilers. You can also add the Mingw-w64 path to your System PATH variable to make it available in Windows Command Prompt and the Run (Win + R) dialog, so that you can drop Unix commands into them.
In addition to the host of native tools, mysys includes a package management system based on Arch Linux’s Pacman that makes software installation incredibly easy. You can install packages like awk, tar, and autotools with ease. It also provides up-to-date native builds of many common tools such as mingw-w64, GCC, CPython, OpenSSL, and more.