Did you know that many Unix core programs are available as Windows executables? Because the code for these utilities is open source, there are a couple of different organizations that have taken the liberty of compiling them for the Windows platform and making them available. One such project is GnuWin32. If you want to, say, use common Unix text processing programs on Windows as part of your Hyperion automation, you definitely can. You would just install the programs on your server, probably add their folder to your system PATH, and then be able to call them like any other program.

Why would you want to do this? There are some really great programs available on Unix platforms that might be useful for some one-off processing you do as part of your automation. In the coming days I’m going to post a few examples of some interesting text processing examples you might do with these utilities that are inspired by Essbase/Hyperion. Of course, for those of you already running Linux/AIX, you should already be set (and of course, as a smug Mac user myself, I am good to go at least with my development machine…).

Another such project that otherwise makes Unix tools available on Windows is the Cygwin project, which you might want to check out too if you need to get this functionality on a Windows machine.