So you’ve followed my instructions for updating config.guess for Interix 5.2 (the version shipping with Windows 2003 Server R2) and now you want to compile something. Interix ships with C Shell (csh) and Korn Shell (ksh) but lacks the Bourne Again Shell (bash) – the shell most Linux users will be familiar with, so why not start there? From Start->Programs->Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications start either ‘Korn Shell’ or ‘C Shell’. You’ll end up in ‘/dev/fs/C/Documents and Settings/’ (this is your home directory, ‘~’) and the root is ‘%SystemRoot%\SUA’. Download bash-3.0 and extract it somewhere sensible (like /usr/src). You’ll need to ‘gunzip bash-3.0.tar.gz’ first and then do ‘tar xf bash-3.0.tar’ as it’s not gtar so it doesn’t understand ‘z’ (gzip) and ‘j’ (bzip2) options. Change to the ‘bash-3.0’ directory and ‘./configure --prefix=/usr/local/bash-3.0‘, then ‘make‘ and ‘make install‘. Now it’s just a case of creating a link to ‘%SystemRoot%\posix.exe /u /c /usr/local/bash-3.0/bin/bash -l’ in the start menu. When you click on this link you’ll end up with a window that looks and behaves like a command window, only with a red/yellow/blue logo.

You may get errors like ‘error retrieving current directory: getcwd: cannot access parent directories: Undefined error: 0‘ – I suspect these are due to permissions problems, or issues with spaces in paths. I’d be interested if someone has a better explanation, especially if it came with a fix.