Hi guys,
My newest problem comes from somewhat left field. My financial backer asked me to write a script for another one of his students. With all you guys have taught me, I found the job easy enough; the commands are

And


However, these individuals are busy people and dont want to have to download cygwin, or muck around with the command line. Is there a way of compiling these so that they come out as a windows executable file? Something that they just place in the folder containing the files of interest, double click and the script runs as written? Help would be much appreciated.

I would rather download an awk binary for windows and put it next to the scripts. http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/gawk.htm

How do I do that? I would like instructions, im very new to this stuff.

first try to download this awk and test your scripts (if they work properly with this awk).
second make cmd files which contain the script (as quoted) and able to run on windows.

kk, i dl'd the gawk for windows package, and wrote a file containing the text

and named the file 180man.cmd. It didn't work, but what is beginning to occur to me is that this solution will only work for awk scripts. If i ever want to do some work for them that involves a command line tool other than awk, I will be back to square 1. Does anyone know of a tool that compiles simple awk scripts to make standalone windows executable's? Failing that, If i could get them to download cygwin, could i make a file that when double clicked, opens an instance of cygwin, runs the script from within its folder, and then closes again?

What was the problem with that cmd file?
Probably you need to use ":
"C:\Program Files (x86)\GnuWin32\bin\gawk-3.1.6" myawkscript

here is a compiler: http://www.tasoft.com/tawk.html

Ok guys, I'm back, been too busy to check in on this thread the last few days and seen it hasn't moved. How about I make the question simpler; how would I make a batch file that when double clicked runs a cygwin command, assuming cygwin has already been installed? I would really like help on this issue.

Alright, I have approached the problem thusly- I created a notepad file with the command

and saved as 180man.sh. I then performed the command dos2unix on the file. I then copied the file into my cygwin /bin directory. From the terminal, I performed the command

chmod a+x 180man.sh

I then returned to my working directory, and typed 180man.sh, and got the following error message

Which is absolutely mystifying. Does anyone have any idea whats going on here????

Ok, I have tried to reduce the command to 3 and finally 1 new line; I get the error message each time, meaning something in the command is being interpreted as $'\357\273\277awk'; and I have no idea why. Has anyone else seen this behaviour from cygwin? Why would it interpret the command in the shell script to read what it does above? When I open the file in notepad I still see the awk command I have written up as per normal.

Alright, have just tried the process again with a completely different command

and got exactly the same error message

Does anyone have any idea whats going on?

Yes. The crappy text editor you used to create the script inserted a byte order mark at the start of the file. You need to remove it, or use another editor.

The Unicode code for the BOM is U+FEFF. In UTF-8 encoding, it uses three bytes, 239 187 191 (decimal), which can be also written as \357\273\277 (octal) or \xef\xbb\xbf (hex).

Easiest way to remove the BOM from winnings.sh is to run
The command will remove it from anywhere in UTF-8 text, but that's intentional. Although the BOM is only "allowed" at the start of the file, Windows utilities seem to sprinkle them willy-nilly; better remove them altogether.

You can use awk to remove BOMs and convert newlines to the Unix flavour at one go:
but note that it does not edit the original file, it creates a fixed copy.

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