title: alternative bash for windows / or help on cygwin with specific tasks
body: <p>my goal: to create a suite of scripts that do some common system tasks, which include these</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>copy/move/list/search/grep files</li>
  <li>watch/start/stop processes</li>
  <li>run queries against Oracle via sqlplus</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>i grew accustomed to using Cygwin/bash to ease my life at work, and frankly speaking, i don't want to move away from bash language and start learning PowerShell, for example - so i started searching for a way to run bash scripts on Windows, ... preferably something alternative to Cygwin.</p>
  
  <p>the truth is that i am still not pleased with Cygwin installation, and the fact that there is no simple way around it, that it is targeting more or less expert users, and there are a number of things that might pop up during the installation. i mean. what i am trying to do now is to write a suite of scripts that will target someone less expert than me (and i am in no way a real expert) - in most cases some kind of an administrator who doesn't want to know the script details.</p>
  
  <p>i am thinking that this user will also want to be able to run these scripts on another machine, and i want to be able to explain him/her how to do it, without just saying, call the support, and, me, eventually (so that we can install cygwin on another machine etc etc.)</p>
  
  <p>i tried MinGW(msys) but it also needs manual steps to set things up - i mean, these manual steps have become something of a de facto standard in these Windows ports (sorry, maybe i have a mood for bragging). win-bash looked like it could be a solution, but i ended up trashing it too, because of the old bash version, and its inability to do things i was able to do in cygwin - specifically </p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>here documents</li>
  <li>things like "cmd /C dir *" (don't know why) - and yes, i do cmd /C dir in cases i am in some kind of shared network folder with thousands of files, and ls is significantly slower than dir</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>my questions at last:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>am i doomed to use PowerShell? i guess i will, reluctantly, if i have to</li>
  <li>is there a simple pre-packaged "slim" cygwin installation.. or, portable cygwin, even better? there is a cygwin-portable project on sourceforge, but it's not that doesn't need those manual steps, again, apparently - is there a way to automate those steps, perhaps? and if there is, i wonder why somebody hasn't done it already? - and then, would it be possible to call bash scripts from Windows command prompt using a simple command like "bash somescript.sh"?</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>thanks for your attention.</p>