[[!comment format=mdwn
 username="https://www.google.com/accounts/o8/id?id=AItOawkRITTYYsN0TFKN7G5sZ6BWGZOTQ88Pz4s"
 nickname="Zoltán"
 subject="cygwin"
 date="2012-05-15T00:14:08Z"
 content="""
What about [Cygwin](http://cygwin.com/)? It emulates POSIX fairly well under Windows (including signals, forking, fs (also things like /dev/null, /proc), unix file permissions), has all standard gnu utilities. It also emulates symlinks, but they are unfortunately incompatible with NTFS symlinks introduced in Vista [due to some stupid restrictions on Windows](http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2009-10/msg00756.html).

If git-annex could be modified to not require symlinks to work, the it would be a pretty neat solution (and you get a real shell, not some command.com on drugs (aka cmd.exe))
"""]]