shell scripts on windows xp

I am college going student, I have unix labs as part of my course. I want to practise shell, perl and some unix commands at home. Is there any way to it on my xp laptop. i dont want to intall whole linux OS o开发者_运维百科n my laptop. is there any way where i can practicse shell scripts, perl scripts and some unix commands frm my windos xp laptop

thanks in advance

regards

vinayak

You can use cygwin to install a Bash shell for you

http://www.cygwin.com/

I think it has Perl that you can choose to install, but if not, you can use:

http://www.perl.org/get.html

Another way is that you can try Virtual Machine and install Ubuntu on it. It can be a lot of fun to see a Linux box running like a real machine on your Windows. A free Virtual Machine program that's good to run Ubuntu is VirtualBox.