INTRO(1) Cygwin INTRO(1)NAME
intro - Introduction to the Cygwin Environment
DESCRIPTION
Cygwin is a Linux-like environment for Windows. It consists of two
parts:
A DLL (cygwin1.dll) which acts as a Linux API emulation layer providing
substantial Linux API functionality. The intro(3) man page gives an
introduction to this API.
A collection of tools which provide Linux look and feel. This man page
describes the user environment.
AVAILABILITY
Cygwin is developed by volunteers collaborating over the Internet. It
is distributed through the website http://cygwin.com, where you can
find extensive documentation, including FAQ, User's Guide, and API Ref‐
erence. The Cygwin website should be considered the authoritative
source of information. The source code, released under the GNU General
Public License, Version 2, is also available from the website or one of
the mirrors.
COMPATIBILITY
Cygwin uses the GNU versions of many of the standard UNIX command-line
utilities (sed, awk, etc.), so the user environment is more similar to
a Linux system than, for example, Sun Solaris.
The default login shell and /bin/sh for Cygwin is bash, the GNU
"Bourne-Again Shell", but other shells such as tcsh (an improved csh)
are also available and can be installed using Cygwin's setup.exe.
NOTES
To port applications you will need to install the development tools,
which you can do by selecting gcc in setup.exe (dependencies are auto‐
matically handled). If you need a specific program or library, you can
search for a Cygwin package containing it at:
http://cygwin.com/packages/
If you are a UNIX veteran who plans to use Cygwin extensively, you will
probably find it worth your while to learn to use Cygwin-specific tools
that provide a UNIX-like interface to common operations. For example,
cygpath converts between UNIX and Win32-style pathnames. The full docu‐
mentation for these utilities is at:
http://cygwin.com/cygwin-ug-net/using-utils.html
The optional cygutils package also contains utilities that help with
common problems, such as dos2unix and unix2dos for the CRLF issue.
DOCUMENTATION
In addition to man pages and texinfo documentation, many Cygwin pack‐
ages provide system-independent documentation in the /usr/share/doc/
directory and Cygwin-specific documentation in /usr/share/doc/Cygwin/
For example, if you have both less and cron installed, the command
less /usr/share/doc/Cygwin/cron.README
would display the instructions to set up cron on your system.
REPORTING BUGS
If you find a bug in Cygwin, please read
http://cygwin.com/bugs.html
and follow the instructions for reporting found there. If you are able
to track down the source of the bug and can provide a fix, there are
instructions for contributing patches at:
http://cygwin.com/contrib.html
COPYRIGHT
Cygwin is Copyright (C) 1995-2010 Red Hat, Inc.
Cygwin is Free software; for complete licensing information, refer to:
http://cygwin.com/licensing.html
SEE ALSOintro(3)
April 2010 INTRO(1)
