 This video is to answer a question of a viewer, I wanted to do a tutorial on this and maybe I will let me explain. I'm going to try to answer the question without giving a demonstration because the demonstration is too much work. I would love to do some videos on the Windows operating system not because I like using Windows but because there are times where you're going to have to use the Windows operating system somewhere and you want to help somebody or do something and all you have is a Windows machine and for some reason you may not be allowed to boot a Linux distribution on that machine and so I would do some videos on just like just getting certain things done because out of the box Windows is for the most part useless. It's gotten slightly bit better in the last couple of years with PowerShell. PowerShell actually does do a lot useful stuff. Every time I've looked at this the code is a mess it's a lot bulkier a lot more lines of code than I feel like it should be needed. The commands are really long but I guess a lot of them have abbreviations but whenever you look up tutorials and examples they give you the full version so like if you want to download a file it's like PowerShell.InitExplorer.Remote.Download or something something something crazy like that instead of just like wget. But let me go back to the question that the viewer asked. The question was how do I get a bash shell on my Windows machine and I replied in the comment how to answer that so I have in the past come across a single executable bash.exe which you can get and you just have that one executable. The problem with that is it's bash but that doesn't mean it has all the core tools it has it's bash so tools like grep and awk and and dd and all these other tools may not be aren't going to be in that executable so if you're going to use those it's a bash shell but not all the external tools aren't there and I'm not sure where to get that I quickly googled it when the person asked and I couldn't find it I did find a win-bash project and it was a zip file which had bash and all these executables for all these core tools so that would be one option I haven't tried that but I would think you would just unzip that put it in a folder that's linked to your sys your your path your sys path whatever you call it you know or just run it from that directory and then you have bash and all those common tools and I think the zip file when I downloaded it was five megabytes I didn't test it I just downloaded it to see what was in the zip file so that would be another option normally if I am at a windows machine and I just need a halfway decent shell you can get I think it's called flipper or something like that but busybox I've talked about busybox a lot I love busybox it's on most Linux devices if you have a router or your phone or your tv busybox is in there it's very easy to install on multiple Linux distributions and it's a single binary file that has so many tools built in and it's usually like one and a half megabytes if you get the full thing and you can recompile it with less tools if you don't need them all but it will have um dd in it it will have w get in it it will have netcat in it it will have grep and awk and some of them are slimmed down versions of it like the netcat or nc is not quite a full version of netcat there are a few features missing but for most parts there even has vi built in all in a 1.5 megabyte file now when you end on windows it even has an ftp server a telnet server and an http web server the windows binary when I've downloaded it are missing some of those server functionalities the the ftp the telnet and the um and the web server are missing for most part all those tools are there so unlike that other bash project where you have the bash shell and you have all these external executables which is fine this is all in one binary and so you can call it you know um busybox.exe and the command you want or you can go busybox.exe sh and it will start the shell for you and all those tools will be available there you drop that one binary in your windows sys32 folder and it should you should be able to access it but as I just said it that's not bash it's actually a shell or ash I'm not really sure how you say it which is very similar and if you're just working at the shell there you know for the most part it's going to be there and I don't really know the differences but if you try to run a bash shell first of all you'd have to change the shebang line just be sh um but there might be some some differences uh some functionality might work a little different just I know like with the z shell and bash you know I have z shell as my main shell but I write my scripts in bash and there are a few things especially when it comes like brace expansions and stuff are different from bash to z shell and I'm sure sure that ash is the same way so it's not quite bash but if you need a decent shell with a lot of your core the new tools in there that's a single binary just google busybox.exe for windows and it'll be one of the first sites to come up and it's called flippery.busybox or something like that dash busybox another option uh there are a couple of package managers for windows um a lot of them I have not tried uh because the few times that I've uh needed this uh I is because I'm at my machine at work which is running Windows 7 with PowerShell one and all these package managers need newer versions of PowerShell and I'm not allowed to upgrade PowerShell on my machine so I mean I probably could but I'm not supposed to um but chocolatey is the package manager that I've used so it's is it chocolatey or chock chockalate just talk just just google chocolate package manager and it should come up and uh you can easily uh usually you need to have a minister access but there I think there is a way to install things locally uh if you don't have a mystery so just put it inside I guess your your documents folder or something like that I'm not really sure but it's just like one or two PowerShell commands and it will install and then you just type in chocolatey search or chocolatey install and you can install packages and I would assume I didn't look but I would assume that bash is in there but I know the GNU core tools are in there and busybox is in there so you can just chocolatey install uh GNU core tools or something you know chocolatey install busybox and you can get a shell that way I also know that um Windows now has the i heart linux linux subsystem for Windows I haven't touched that I don't know anything about that I'm not really sure how that works I'm assuming that's more than just a bash shell it's probably like a a much larger package and I'll try to answer the question of just bash and trying to get it to as minimum you know one or a handful of files for you but I guess that would be an option as well now going back why am I talking about this rather than showing you um well I was like uh you know I guess I could do a tutorial on this and I have you know gotten Windows running in virtual machines before so I went to Microsoft allows you uh just you can google search yourself uh Windows virtual box images and one of the first links will be from Microsoft uh developers dot Microsoft dot com or something like that and you can get uh virtual machine images of Windows XP through Windows 10 uh for different virtual machines uh virtual box being one of them VMware being another I think there's a couple others and you can download that zip file extract it then import it into your virtual machine and then you have it's either 30 60 or 90 days to use that image and then it expires and you need to you know wind it back or go through that process again so I went to do that and Windows 10 was what the file I downloaded and zipped as a zip file was a 16 gig file almost 17 gigs and took forever to download and then it took forever to extract all that and then I went to import it into virtual box and it's and it's like setting up the appliance I think they call it in virtual box and it's like this is going to take 26 minutes I'm like I've already spent like 45 minutes just downloading and extracting this file it's nothing but bloatware I just got fed up and said forget this and I was like I literally could have gone to something like Linux mint most links distributions in my opinion these days are overly bloated when I first started using Linux most of the images would fit on a cd then they got bigger to where you need a dvd and they were just you know they were originally they were like 500 to 650 megabytes and then they got closer to the gig and to me I mean Linux comes with so many different tools so it's really hard to rate but let's start getting over a gig for an installer and again a lot of these are live CDs anyway I could go to Linux mint dot com and download a current version of Linux mint that's 1.8 gigabytes iso which I would I would consider ridiculous in size but nothing compared to the 16 gigs 17 gigs that windows 10 was I could download that load that into a virtual machine get it running as a as a live cd or a live system be doing stuff while it's installing to the virtual machine and have that installation done and reboot probably before I could finish downloading the windows 10 zip file let alone extracting it and getting it set up in the virtual machine and it's just I consider most Linux distributions nowadays to be bloated but they are nothing compared to windows which is just ridiculous and and the Linux the windows thing isn't going to have any office suites probably isn't going to have I don't know it might have a pdf reader in it it isn't going to have any image manipulation thing beyond paintbrush where at least this 1.8 iso image is going to have you know gimp and livery office it's going to have media players going to play all your media files and at least try to install the codecs if they aren't already installed it's a completely usable system without having to install anything else where the windows thing is just windows and windows without installing third-party software is nothing I mean I guess you consider gimp third party when I say third party I mean it doesn't come with it that isn't provided by the maintainers of that distribution so that would be why I didn't do a tutorial on this and I still might if I could sit down at a windows machine that I can do you know the the demonstration on do a screencast of but uh but yeah it is just just getting and and then after I start all this I'm like you know I should do a video I should do a video that that would be two two screenshots one would be you know me downloading Linux Mint getting it up and running and doing stuff with it while I'm downloading on this other screenshot uh downloading the windows and downloading the windows image extracting the windows windows image setting up the windows image and like I said I'd be able to do all this probably before this is done downloading and I started to do that I started to record that and I got the whole Linux one down down downloading Linux Mint getting it going in a virtual box I didn't do the install I just got booted and I was like okay now I'm going to go record the windows side of it and I just realized this is going to be just a super long boring video because it's going to take an hour and a half to get windows set up so it's like they're going to be going at the same time download Linux get loaded and then when Linux windows just going to sit there while the windows is downloading extracting installing and I was going to title something like windows sucks before you it's even installed Linux versus windows or something like that you know something something that's going to and then just going to get a bunch of mean comments from windows users who don't know what they're doing but will defend windows to the end but but yeah windows sucks before it's even installed so there you go if you have problems with that comment below because it does suck and it's completely useless out of the box power shell is a little bit more helpful can do a couple of things but before power shell you had visual basic script and batch files that was about it to do anything useful without having to install something like python or or some sort of c compiler but thanks for watching please visit filmsbychrist.com that's Chris the K there's a link in description as always I hope that you have a great day