MKS Toolkit

MKS Toolkit is a software package produced and maintained by PTC that provides a Unix-like environment for scripting, connectivity and porting Unix and Linux software to Microsoft Windows. It was originally created for MS-DOS, and OS/2 versions were released up to version 4.4.^[1] Several editions of each version, such as MKS Toolkit for developers, power users, enterprise developers and interoperability are available, with the enterprise developer edition being the most complete.^[2]

Before PTC, MKS Toolkit was owned by MKS Inc. In 1999, MKS acquired a company based in Fairfax, Virginia, USA called Datafocus Inc. The Datafocus product NuTCRACKER had included the MKS Toolkit since 1994 as part of its Unix compatibility technology. The MKS Toolkit was also licensed by Microsoft for the first two versions of their Windows Services for Unix, but later dropped in favor of Interix after Microsoft purchased the latter company.

Version 10.0 was current as of October 2017^[update].^[3]

Overview

The MKS Toolkit products offer functionality in the following areas:

• Command shell environments of Bourne shell, KornShell, Bash, C shell, Tcl shell
• Traditional Unix commands (400+), including grep, awk, sed, vi, ls, kill^[4]
• Windows specific commands (70+), including registry, shortcut, desktop, wcopy, db, dde, userinfo^[5]
• Tape and archive commands, including tar, cpio, pax, zip, bzip2, ar
• Remote connectivity, including ssh, remote shell, telnet, xterm, kterm, rexec, rlogin^[6]
• Porting APIs, including fork(), signals, alarms, threads^[7]
• Graphical porting APIs, including X, ncurses, Motif, OpenGL

Supported operating systems

MKS Toolkit products support all IA-32 and x64 of the Microsoft Windows operating systems.^[8] There is some loss of functionality running IA-32 versions on Windows 9x.^[9] Earlier versions ran on MS-DOS and compatible operating systems.^[10]

See also

• Cygwin
• MinGW
• Hamilton C shell
• UnxUtils
• UWIN
• GnuWin32

References

1. Mario Morejon (2004-07-16). "MKS Makes Unix Migration An Easy Task". CRN.
2. MKS Toolkit instruction booklet, version 8.6
3. "Convert UNIX and Linux to Windows with PTC MKS Toolkit". MKS. Retrieved 10 October 2017.
4. "MKS Toolkit Commands: vi, sed, grep, awk, tar, gnu binutils, sh, ksh, csh, bash Command".
5. "MKS Toolkit Commands: Windows Specific Commands".
6. "MKS Toolkit Commands: Commands in the Connectivity Suite Runtime".
7. "MKS Toolkit: Reference Pages: MKS Toolkit UNIX APIs Reference".
8. "MKS Customer Support: Supported Versions".
9. "MKS Toolkit Release Notes, Version 8.0". MKS Software, Inc. January 2002. Retrieved November 22, 2015. In addition, because of the lack of certain operating features on Windows 95/98/Me, some MKS Toolkit UNIX APIs run in degraded mode (or return without doing anything) on those platforms.
10. Crawford, Frank (October 1991), "Making Real Use of a PC.", Australian UNIX Systems User Group Newsletter, 12 (4/5): 41–43, retrieved November 22, 2015, the basic utilities supplied with MS-DOS leave something to be desired. ... there are a number of packages available that can make your PC almost into a UNIX look-a-like. ... One of these packages is the MKS Toolkit.

Reviews

• Mark Olsen (1989). "Computers and the Humanities, MKS Toolkit: UNIX Tools under MS-DOS". Computers and the Humanities. 23 (3) (3 ed.): 267–270. doi:10.1007/BF00056152. S2CID 5140584.
• Emmett Dulaney (2004-04-02). "Review: Evaluating MKS Toolkit for Developers 8.6". Dr. Dobb's.

External links

• MKS Home