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 POSIX API emulation layer providing substantial POSIX API functionality, modelled after the GNU/Linux operating system. 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 Reference. The Cygwin website should be considered the authoritative source of information. The source code, released under the GNU General Public License, Version 3 (GPLv3+) and Lesser GNU General Public License, Version 3 (LGPLv3+), 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.

NOTES

To port applications you will need to install the development tools, which you can do by selecting gcc in the Cygwin Setup program (dependencies are automatically 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 documentation for these utilities is at:

http://cygwin.com/cygwin-ug-net/using-utils.html

The optional cygutils and cygutils-extra packages also contain utilities that help with common problems.

DOCUMENTATION

In addition to man pages and texinfo documentation, many Cygwin packages 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

SEE ALSO

intro(3)

COPYRIGHT

Copyright © Cygwin authors

Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this documentation provided the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved on all copies.

Permission is granted to copy and distribute modified versions of this documentation under the conditions for verbatim copying, provided that the entire resulting derived work is distributed under the terms of a permission notice identical to this one.

Permission is granted to copy and distribute translations of this documentation into another language, under the above conditions for modified versions, except that this permission notice may be stated in a translation approved by the Free Software Foundation.