Like many enterprise developers I use both Windows and Linux. Sometimes I really want to be able to use POSIX text processing tools on Windows, for example when troubleshooting pipe delimted data files used in batch system interfaces. I often have to research issues with pipe delimited transaction logs, and awk can be used to filter out the records of interest, eg.
awk -F| '($3==276||$3==259) && $5=="Payment " { OFS="|"; print $0 }' < transaction_log
Using a command line text tool like this can be much more efficient than importing text files into Excel for filtering. Other text tools I use heavily include find, grep, sed, tr and wc.
POSIX tools for Windows include SUA (aka. Interix, aka. SFU) and MKS toolkit but I prefer Cygwin or Cygwin/X
Under Cygwin I used to use rxvt, but now I’ve switched to mintty which is similar to PuTTY. X can be started from a mintty session as follows:
xwin -multiwindow -clipboard