… I have arrived!
After numerous false starts, I have finally learnt (just) enough Perl to do the essential Unix-like file processing operations like head, tail, grep etc. on Windows. I am in my “Windows usage phase”, and there is absolutely nothing you can do through the command line. (And Windows Vista sucks even otherwise, which means soon I will be back to my “Ubuntu phase”.) I do use cygwin, but Perl is fun.
First Principles 