Submitted by IBM’s primer to Cygwin. Cygwin is a UNIX-like environment for the Microsoft Windows operating system. Cygwin includes a real UNIX shell, a Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX) emulation library, and thousands of UNIX utilities ported to Windows. Learn how to drop to Cygwin and use its UNIX-like command line to manipulate the system.
while most of the IBM articles are just blatent advertising for their company, this was actuayl helpfull and nice to see teh step by step. thanks IBM
I loves my Cygwin!!! I work with hundreds of Unix and Linux servers at work, but access them through my Windows XP laptop. Installing Cygwin on it made it much easier to tolerate.
As I often joke to my IT department…
Cygwin makes Windows usable!
Anybody else find Cygwin very slow. We migrated over to MinGW/MSYS and halved the time of long-running shell scripts.
Cygwin is not particularly well (or securely) implemented. Windows Services for Unix is better integrated (though you might need a higher SKU of Windows to use the recent ones).
But not as good. When Developers make an attempt to ensure a linux app works on windows, they typically test it against cygwin, not Unix services for windows. Cygwin also comes with its own package manager.
fork()ing on CYGWIN is extremely slow, which you end up doing a lot whenever you run a makefile or any shell script for that matter.
who cares?
Edited 2008-12-17 21:41 UTC
Anyone not happy with Cygwin’s builtin terminal that runs in a Windows console window might want to give MinTTY a try:
http://code.google.com/p/mintty
It’s still in development, but pretty usable already. Feedback via the issue tracker much welcome.
cygwin has an excellent terminal emulator called rxvt – unfortunately it’s not the default
Or just use Console2: http://sourceforge.net/projects/console
http://code.google.com/p/puttycyg/
Nice article, it made me download and install Cygwin for the first time in years. I always felt that SFU was better integrated but unfortunately it won’t be updated in the future.
By the way, for those of us who prefer tcsh, here is a quick lesson on replacing bash as the default shell:
http://www.cs.nyu.edu/~yap/prog/cygwin/FAQs.html#shell
I think if it were a little better integrated with Windows and vice versa it would be better. Most of the open source tools that I use also have windows ports to them which are often easier to install in Windows, and accessible outside of Cigwin.
I think it is mostly the case for me that when I am on a different Operating system my though process for that OS is different. Thus I tend to dislike Linux systems trying to look like or act like Macs or Windows, And Windows trying to act like Linux/Unix etc…
I tend to think the same way. I prefer to go all-out; if I’m using Windows, I want plain old Windows with COMMAND.COM, CMD.EXE, or maybe the PowerShell. If I’m using Linux, I want it pure. If I’m using DOS, well, same thing. I hate how FreeDOS installs the GNU utilities by default (and lots of other unnecessary crap unless you go through a list and spend a few minutes un-checking stuff). It just doesn’t feel right, it’s way out of place.
On the other hand, I do like playing around with virtual machines and DOSBox (which looks, feels and acts just like the real thing), but then, those are self-contained and can be kept pure. I can see the use in PuTTY, as it allows you to log into a UNIX/Linux machine and use it as if you were actually on it (all in a little Unix-like command window), but I have a hard time seeing the use of Cygwin myself. Sounds like just using UNIX/Linux would be a better choice, and maybe Windows in a VM if absolutely required.
Honestly, although I don’t think it’s well-maintained (if at all), I think UnxUtils provides better integration with Windows. It’s made up of Windows-native .exe versions of common GNU utilities, which can be used in the regular command prompt by simply dropping them in C:\WINDOWS or (better yet) extracting them to a new folder and adding it to the PATH. These don’t require a special program like Cygwin just to run, and again, they’re native Windows binaries.
Edited 2008-12-18 19:51 UTC
All the “terminal” you need: http://x.cygwin.com/