This is another “note to self”, because there are literally hundreds of similar instructions at the top of google search results. Obviously. Where did you think I got all I know? The sites I used are all referenced below.
Anyway, suppose you are using Windows with Git Bash already installed and you want to get your hands on a handy little app from the linux world quickly and without installing full-fledged environments like WSL. Turns out Git Bash is kinda based on MSYS2 with a limited number of preinstalled essential tools. We’re going to get additional precompiled tools from the MSYS2 repo and drop them into the Git Bash folder. As an example, I’m installing rsync
, iperf3
and whois
. I’m using Git Bash that came with git
version 2.44.0.windows.1.
- Go to https://repo.msys2.org/msys/x86_64/ and grab the compressed (
*.zst
) packages:whois-5.5.23-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst
iperf3-3.17.1-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst
rsync-3.3.0-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst
libxxhash-0.8.2-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst
Your package versions may differ from mine; I just downloaded the most recent ones. The first three are obvious, the last is a rsync
dependency. Different websites list different dependencies that you have to install for rsync
. For instance, this guy and these people suggest installing more packages, like libopenssl
; however, I found them already installed in Git Bash.
-
Open the archives one by one (both 7zip and the built-in unarchiver in Windows 11 worked for me) and drop the
usr
folders directly into theC:\Program Files\Git
. The destination already contains theusr
folder, so this action just adds the new content to the existingusr
’s subfolders (e.g.,usr\bin
). -
Open the Git Bash terminal,
mintty
, and try using the apps.
For instance, the following command will download the /home/user
folder from remote
server to the current working directory.
rsync -avz --stats user@remote:/home/user .
iperf3
can be used for testing the network connection speed. This command tests the bidirectional connection with server
that is listening at the port
:
iperf3 -c server -p port -bidir
For this to work, you have to either turn on the server somewhere (e.g., with iperf3 -s -p port
- don’t forget to specify the port) or choose one of the public servers.
whois
can be used to query the info regarding an IP address or a domain name. However, it was news to me that ICANN is actively retiring the WHOIS protocol in favor of a shiny new thing called RDAP. Who knows? Maybe some time soon we’ll have to get rid of whois
as it will be totally obsolete. Even now you can get RDAP/WHOIS data, that is, “WHOIS only if RDAP is not available”, via the web tools like this official ICANN page.