MKS Toolkit explained

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 .^[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|awk]], [[sed]], [[Vi (text editor)|vi]], [[ls]], [[Kill (command)|kill]]^[4]
• Windows specific commands (70+), including registry, shortcut, desktop, wcopy, db, dde, userinfo^[5]
• Tape and archive commands, including [[Tar (computing)|tar]], [[cpio]], pax, zip, bzip2, [[Ar (Unix)|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.

See also

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

References

Reviews

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

External links

• MKS Home

Notes and References

1. Web site: MKS Makes Unix Migration An Easy Task. Mario Morejon. 2004-07-16. CRN.
2. MKS Toolkit instruction booklet, version 8.6
3. Web site: Convert UNIX and Linux to Windows with PTC MKS Toolkit . MKS. 10 October 2017.
4. Web site: MKS Toolkit Commands: vi, sed, grep, awk, tar, gnu binutils, sh, ksh, csh, bash Command.
5. Web site: MKS Toolkit Commands: Windows Specific Commands.
6. Web site: MKS Toolkit Commands: Commands in the Connectivity Suite Runtime.
7. Web site: MKS Toolkit: Reference Pages: MKS Toolkit UNIX APIs Reference.
8. Web site: MKS Customer Support: Supported Versions.
9. Web site: MKS Toolkit Release Notes, Version 8.0 . January 2002 . MKS Software, Inc. . 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..