Starting with distribution 20.6 the GAMS system for Windows includes a collection of Posix utilities which are usually available for the different Unix systems and therefore help to write platform independent scripts. The following utilities are available:

• awk - Pattern scanning and processing language (1)
• cat - Concatenate and print files
• cksum - Write file checksums and sizes
• cmp - Compare two files
• comm - Select or reject lines common to two files
• cp - Copy files
• cut - Cut out selected fields of each line of a file
• diff - Compare two files
• expr - Evaluate arguments as an expression
• fold - Fold lines
• gsort - Sort, merge, or sequence check text files (1)
• grep - File pattern searcher
• gdate - Write the date and time (1)
• gunzip - File decompression
• gzip - File compression
• head - Copy the first part of files
• join - Relational database operator
• make - Build automation tool
• mkdir - Create a new directory
• mv - Move files
• od - Dump files in various formats
• paste - Merge corresponding or subsequent lines of files
• printf - Write formatted output
• rm - Remove directory entries
• sed - Stream editor
• sleep - Suspend execution for an interval
• tail - Copy the last part of a file
• tar - Collect files into one archive file
• tee - Duplicate standard input
• test - Evaluate expression
• touch - Update access date and/or modification date of a file or directory
• tr - Translate characters
• uniq - Report or filter out repeated lines in a file
• wc - Word, line, and byte count
• xargs - Construct argument list(s) and invoke utility

(1) Please note that the utilities "date" and "sort" have been renamed to "gdate" and "gsort" to avoid conflicts with the Windows commands "date" and "sort". For compatibility reasons the GNU implementation of awk called "gawk" has been renamed to "awk".

The binaries were mostly taken from the MSYS2 distribution with exception of the MinGW-w64 build of GNU awk (awk.exe), which was taken from Volker Kiefel's homepage.

Detailed descriptions of the utilities can be found at the GNU website.

The Posix tools and in particular the awk utility can be used to transform a variety of different text inputs into GAMS readable input files. Examples can be found in the GAMS Model Library (Subject "GAMS Tools").