How to add man and zip to "git bash" installation on Windows

halloleo picture halloleo · Aug 5, 2016 · Viewed 57.1k times · Source

I am using "git bash" on Windows - that is git for Windows via the integrated bash. Apparently it uses the MINGW/MSYS underpinning. (Update from @VonC: It now uses msys2 since msysgit is obsolete since Q4 2015.)

So there are already a lot of MSYS tools installed - from awk to zcat. However I miss the man command and zip to compress multiple files into a zip file (unzip exists!).

Where from can I install them? I do not want to install another copy of the MINGW system! Any way just to add some pre-compiled tools to the git bash installation?

Answer

VonC picture VonC · Aug 5, 2016

The zip command can be install from GoW (Gnu On Windows). man is not provided (too big).

It is to note however, that if you only want to add the zip command from GoW, still the whole GoW system has to be downloaded and installed. Then you can delete the other commands from the bin directory, however make sure to keep the needed dlls in the directory.