rmyorston

It's possible to benefit from containers without using the extension:

   https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/containers#w_for-advanced-users

Yes. The shell in BusyBox is derived from ash via dash. They have diverged over the years but there is some flow of patches between the two. While dash aims to be POSIX-compatible the BusyBox shell includes selected bash features.

The shell in the busybox-w32 port has much of the POSIX and bash goodness of upstream BusyBox. It's a native WIN32 application so there are some concepts that don't translate well. For example, job control isn't supported and signal handling is limited. On the whole, though, I think it provides a reasonably comfortable shell experience.

I can see three books on my shelves that have horizontal titles. All the rest have the text from top to bottom with one exception, my PhD thesis.

This has always bothered me.

Hanging above my desk is a sheet of thirty two dollar bills which I purchased from the Bureau of Engraving and Printing in Washington DC and had framed. It's a conscious nod towards Boggs and his art.

This won't be to everyone's taste but if you value 'lightweight' over 'feature-complete' busybox-w32 [1] may be worth a look. It's a port of BusyBox to WIN32, with random code borrowed from GNUlib for stuff that Microsoft omitted.

I maintain the most active fork and got into using it when I ported my last employer's software to Windows. This was originally developed in the early 1990s to run on Unix workstations. For portability it used Bourne shell (not bash) and nawk (not gawk). BusyBox allowed them to bundle a single executable with the Windows version that was adequate to run those scripts.

Some projects use busybox-w32 to allow a Unix-centric build system to work on Windows. Julia, for example, seems to use it just to get echo and printf.

[1] https://github.com/rmyorston/busybox-w32