I'm not quite sure what your question is. Any Linux will call up a terminal if you type xterm in the run box (Alt-F2). Older versions of Windows have their own terminal/shell called command.com while later ones have CMD.EXE. Here is the wikipedia page on it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command_Prompt_(Windo...

Now if you are looking for a UNIX/GNU/Linux emulator on Windows which you can call from the command line, there are, in essence,, two.

CentOS is a free version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It is of course exactly an example of how open source works to our advantage. Red Hat makes its money through consulting and trademarks. Therefore in two thousand three it decided to dump its support for home use except among the developer community (i.e. Fedora is a testing version of RHEL and you get it by essentially agreeing to be Red Hat's guinea pig for programs which may or may not work). CentOS took the pressure off them to support home users who can't pay as much as businesses, and if a business wants to use CentOS they still sometimes need help which means Red Hat can still go for the support contract. Red Hat also has a FOSS emulator for windows called Cygwin:

http://www.cygwin.com/

and there is a similar one called MINimalist GNU for Windows or Mingw:

http://www.mingw.org/

It's really your choice but both come with gcc and you can run either from the CMD.EXE terminal. In fact if you happen to have Dev-C++ on your computer then you have an older version of mingw on it already.

Needing the terminal: now that's a fab idea