Cygwin is definitely the way to go.

ok i drove home and got my linux boxette (laptop) and suse 9, not 6 cd's to load it onto one of my computers here at work,
let's see how this goes. i started using linux (redhat i think it was) around 1995 installed and played with alot of them
rehat mandrake suse freeb but since i got this new job 4 years ago, i havent had time to play with it .
needless to say ive forgotten how to do alot of things in a shell like write a script to run the code you have posted. but here goes

thanks for your help

While I haven't used the standalone executable of AWK in
Windows, I helped a colleague install GNU grep, and it
works OK. As you noted, the installer doesn't do much
(sensible stuff anyway).

But the executables can be used, none the less.


Cheers,
Tink

wow alot ive forgotten about linux