Cygwin
Running Cygwin under Windows XP
Developed by	Cygnus Solutions, Red Hat and others
Initial release	1995, 12–13 years ago
Latest release	1. Windows XP is a family of 32-bit and 64-bit Operating systems produced by Microsoft for use on Personal computers including home and A software developer is a person or organization concerned with facets of the software development process wider than design and coding a somewhat broader scope of Cygnus Solutions, originally Cygnus Support, was founded in 1989 by John Gilmore, Michael Tiemann and David Henkel-Wallace to provide In Computing, Red Hat Inc ( is a company dedicated to Free and open source software, and a major Linux distribution vendor Year 1995 ( MCMXCV) was a Common year starting on Sunday. Events of 1995 A software release is the distribution whether public or private of an initial or new and upgraded version of a Computer software product 5. 25-11 / 9 March 2008
Written in	C/C++
OS	Microsoft Windows
Genre	Emulator
License	GNU General Public License
Website	http://www.cygwin.com/

Cygwin (pronounced /ˈsɪɡwɪn/^[1]) is a collection of tools originally developed by Cygnus Solutions to allow versions of Microsoft Windows to behave in ways familiar to Unix users. Events 590 - Bahram Chobin is crowned as king Barham VI of Persia. 2008 ( MMVIII) is the current year in accordance with the Gregorian calendar, a Leap year that started on Tuesday of the Common A programming language is an Artificial language that can be used to write programs which control the behavior of a machine particularly a Computer. tags please moot on the talk page first! --> In Computing, C is a general-purpose cross-platform block structured C++ (" C Plus Plus " ˌsiːˌplʌsˈplʌs is a general-purpose Programming language. An operating system (commonly abbreviated OS and O/S) is the software component of a Computer system that is responsible for the management and coordination Microsoft Windows is a series of Software Operating systems and Graphical user interfaces produced by Microsoft. Computer software can be organized into categories based on common function type or field of use An emulator duplicates (provides an emulation of the functions of one System using a different system so that the second system behaves like (and appears to A software license (or software licence in commonwealth usage is a Legal instrument governing the usage or redistribution of copyright protected software A website (alternatively web site or Web site, a back-construction from the Proper noun World Wide Web) is a collection of Web pages Cygnus Solutions, originally Cygnus Support, was founded in 1989 by John Gilmore, Michael Tiemann and David Henkel-Wallace to provide Microsoft Windows is a series of Software Operating systems and Graphical user interfaces produced by Microsoft. Unix (officially trademarked as UNIX, sometimes also written as Unix with Small caps) is a computer Programs supported by Cygwin work well on Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista and some run acceptably on Windows 9x. Windows NT is a family of Operating systems produced by Microsoft, the first version of which was released in July 1993 Windows 2000 (also referred to as Win2K) is a preemptive, interruptible graphical and business-oriented Operating system designed to work with Windows XP is a family of 32-bit and 64-bit Operating systems produced by Microsoft for use on Personal computers including home and Windows Vista (ˈvɪstə is a line of Operating systems developed by Microsoft for use on Personal computers including home and business desktops Windows 9x is the family of Microsoft Windows Operating systems that comprises the hybrid 16/32-bit Windows versions Windows 95, Windows 98 While Cygwin provides header files and libraries that make it possible to recompile or to port Unix applications for use on computers running Microsoft Windows operating systems, it does not make binaries compatible with such computers running without Cygwin.

Cygwin is currently maintained by employees of Red Hat, NetApp and others. In Computing, Red Hat Inc ( is a company dedicated to Free and open source software, and a major Linux distribution vendor NetApp Inc ( formerly Network Appliance Inc, is a proprietary Computer storage and Data management company headquartered in Sunnyvale California Christopher Faylor is currently the manager of the Cygwin development team. Released under the GNU General Public License, Cygwin is free software. Free software or software libre is Software that can be used studied and modified without restriction and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified

Contents 1 Description 2 History 3 Features 4 Derivatives 5 Additions to Cygwin 6 Alternatives to Cygwin 6.1 Other UNIX emulators for Windows 6.2 Programming tools 6.3 Reverse approach 7 See also 8 References 9 External links

Description

Cygwin consists of a library that implements the POSIX system call API in terms of Win32 system calls, a GNU development toolchain (such as GCC and GDB) to allow basic software development tasks, and a large number of application programs equivalent to those on the Unix system. POSIX (ˈpɒzɪks or "Portable Operating System Interface" is the collective name of a family of related standards specified by the IEEE to define The Windows API, informally WinAPI, is Microsoft's core set of Application programming interfaces (APIs available in the Microsoft Windows Operating GNU ( pronounced) is a computer Operating system composed entirely of Free software. The GNU Compiler Collection (usually shortened to GCC) is a set of Compilers produced for various Programming languages by the GNU Project The GNU Debugger, usually called just GDB, is the standard Debugger for the GNU software system Many Unix programs have been ported to Cygwin, including the X Window System, KDE, GNOME^[2], Apache, and TeX. KDE ( K Desktop Environment) (ˌkeɪdiːˈiː is a Free software project which aims to be a powerful system for an easy-to-use Desktop environment. A gnome is a Mythical creature characterized by its extremely small size and subterranean lifestyle TeX (ˈtɛx as in Greek, often /ˈtɛk/ in English; written with a lowercase 'e' in imitation of the logo is a Typesetting system designed and mostly Cygwin permits installing inetd, syslogd, sshd, Apache, and other daemons as standard Windows services, allowing Microsoft Windows systems to work like Unix and Linux servers. inetd is a Super-server daemon on many Unix systems that manages Internet services syslog is a standard for forwarding log messages in an IP network. Secure Shell or SSH is a Network protocol that allows data to be exchanged using a Secure channel between two networked devices Unix (officially trademarked as UNIX, sometimes also written as Unix with Small caps) is a computer Linux (commonly pronounced ˈlɪnəks

All of these programs are installed by running Cygwin's "setup" program, which downloads the necessary files from the Internet. Setup can install, update, and remove programs and download the source code for them.

Efforts to reconcile concepts that differ between Unix and Windows systems include:

• A Cygwin-specific version of the Unix mount command allows Windows paths to be mounted as "filesystems" in the Unix file space. Mounting, in Computer science, is the process of making a File system ready for use by the Operating system, typically by reading certain index data structures Mount information is normally stored in the registry. Filesystems can be mounted as binary ones (by default), or as text-based ones, which enables automatic conversion between LF and CRLF endings. In Computing, a newline (also known as a line break or end-of-line / EOL character is a special character or sequence of characters (This only affects programs that call open() or fopen() without specifying text or binary. Programs installed by Cygwin's setup program always open files in binary mode when appropriate, thus avoiding the problem. ) Disk drives (C:, D:, etc. ) are also denominated /cygdrive/c, /cygdrive/d, etc. Windows network paths of the form \\HOST\SHARE\FILE are mapped to //HOST/SHARE/FILE.
• Full-featured /dev and /proc file systems are provided. /proc/registry provides direct filesystem access to the registry.
• Symbolic links are provided, and use . LNK files (Windows shortcuts) containing Cygwin-specific information, and with the "system" attribute set to speed up processing. However, native NTFS symbolic links are handled differently; using the rm deletes the linked file instead of the link itself. An NTFS symbolic link (symlink is a file-system object in the NTFS filesystem that points to another file system object Old Cygwin versions handled symbolic links using plain text files with hidden attribute set and a single line of text, pointing to the destination file or directory.
• The Solaris API for handling access control lists (ACLs) is supported and maps to the Windows NT ACL system. Solaris is a Unix -based Operating system introduced by Sun Microsystems in 1992 as the successor to SunOS. In Computer security, an access control list ( ACL) is a list of permissions attached to an object
• Special formats of /etc/passwd and /etc/group are provided that include pointers to the Windows equivalent SID's (in the GECOS field), allowing for mapping between Unix and Windows users and groups. The gecos field (also written as GECOS field, standing for G eneral E lectric C omprehensive O perating S ystem is an entry
• Various utilities are provided for converting between Windows and Unix file formats, for handling line ending (CRLF/LF) issues, for displaying the DLLs that an executable is linked with, etc. Dynamic-link library (also written without the hyphen or DLL, is Microsoft 's implementation of the Shared library concept in the Microsoft Windows
• The Cygwin library also interfaces to existing Windows libraries. It is possible to call Windows functions like waveOut from Cygwin executable itself.

The version of gcc that comes with Cygwin has various extensions for creating Windows DLLs, specifying whether a program is a windowing or console mode program, adding resources, etc. The GNU Compiler Collection (usually shortened to GCC) is a set of Compilers produced for various Programming languages by the GNU Project It also provides support for compiling MinGW-compatible executables (that is, executables that do not require Cygwin to be installed to run, or more specifically, executables that don't require Cygwin's CYGWIN1. MinGW ( Minimalist GNU for Windows) formerly mingw32, is a native software port of the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC to Microsoft Windows DLL, which provides the POSIX compatibility layer).

Cygwin is used heavily for porting many popular pieces of software to the Windows platform. It is used to compile Mozilla Firefox, Sun Java, OpenOffice.org, and even server software, like lighttpd. Sun Microsystems Inc ( is a multinational vendor of Computers computer components Computer software, and Information technology services OpenOfficeorg ( OOo or OOo) is a free Cross-platform office application suite available for a number of different computer lighttpd (pronounced "lighty" is a Web server designed to be secure fast standards-compliant and flexible while being optimized for speed-critical environments

Red Hat normally licenses the Cygwin library under the GNU General Public License with an exception to allow linking to any free software whose license conforms to the Open Source Definition. Free software or software libre is Software that can be used studied and modified without restriction and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified The Open Source Definition is used by the Open Source Initiative to determine whether or not a software license can be considered open source. (Red Hat also sells commercial licenses to those who wish to redistribute programs that use the Cygwin library under proprietary terms. Proprietary software is Computer software on which the producer has set restrictions on use private modification copying, or republishing. )

History

Cygwin began in 1995 as a project of Steve Chamberlain, a Cygnus engineer who observed that Windows NT and 95 used COFF as their object file format, and that GNU already included support for x86 and COFF, and the C library newlib; so at least in theory it should not be difficult to retarget GCC and get a cross compiler producing executables that would run on Windows. Year 1995 ( MCMXCV) was a Common year starting on Sunday. Events of 1995 Cygnus Solutions, originally Cygnus Support, was founded in 1989 by John Gilmore, Michael Tiemann and David Henkel-Wallace to provide The Common Object File Format ( COFF) is a specification of a format for Executable, Object code, and shared library Computer In Computer science, object code, or an object file, is the representation of code that a Compiler or Assembler generates by processing See also X86 assembly language The generic term x86 refers to the most commercially successful Instruction set architecture in the history of Personal Newlib is a C standard library implementation intended for use on Embedded systems. The GNU Compiler Collection (usually shortened to GCC) is a set of Compilers produced for various Programming languages by the GNU Project A cross compiler is a Compiler capable of creating Executable code for a platform other than the one on which the compiler is run This proved to be so in practice, and a prototype came up quickly.

The next step was to attempt to bootstrap the compiler on a Windows system, but this required enough emulation of Unix to let the GNU configure shell script run, which requires a shell like bash, which in turn requires fork and standard I/O. Autoconf is a tool for producing Shell scripts that automatically configure software Source code packages to adapt to many kinds of UNIX-like systems A shell script is a script written for the shell, or Command line interpreter, of an Operating system. Bash is a Free software Unix shell written for the GNU Project. In Computing, when a process forks, it creates a copy of itself which is called a " child process. In Unix and Unix-like operating systems as well as certain Programming language interfaces the standard streams are preconnected input and output channels Windows includes similar functionality, so the Cygwin library just needs to properly translate calls and manage private versions of data, such as file descriptors. In computer programming a file descriptor is an abstract key for accessing a file

Initially Cygwin was called gnuwin32 (not to be confused with the current GnuWin32 project). The GnuWin32 project provides native ports in the form of runnable computer programs patches and source code for various GNU and Open source tools and The name was changed to Cygwin32 to emphasize Cygnus' role in creating it. When Microsoft registered the trademark Win32, the 32 was dropped to simply become Cygwin. Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational Computer technology Corporation, which rose to dominate the Home computer The Windows API, informally WinAPI, is Microsoft's core set of Application programming interfaces (APIs available in the Microsoft Windows Operating

By 1996, other engineers had joined in, because it was clear that Cygwin would be a useful way to provide Cygnus' embedded tools hosted on Windows systems (the previous strategy had been to use DJGPP). Year 1996 ( MCMXCVI) was a Leap year starting on Monday (link will display full 1996 Gregorian calendar) DJGPP (DJ's GNU Programming Platform is a 32-bit C / C++ / ObjC / ObjC++ / Ada / Fortran development suite for 386 It was especially attractive because it was possible to do a three-way cross-compile, for instance to use a hefty Sun workstation to build, say, a Windows-x-MIPS cross-compiler, which was faster than using the PC of the time. Sun Microsystems Inc ( is a multinational vendor of Computers computer components Computer software, and Information technology services MIPS (originally an acronym for Microprocessor without Interlocked Pipeline Stages) is a RISC microprocessor architecture developed by MIPS Technologies Starting around 1998, Cygnus also began offering the Cygwin package as a product of interest in its own right. Year 1998 ( MCMXCVIII) was a Common year starting on Thursday (link will display full 1998 Gregorian calendar)

Features

• Supports native application building using mingw
• Supports remote logins using rsh, ssh, and telnet
• Embedded cross platforms support, used for many platforms including PSP and PS2
• X Window and OpenGL support
• Windows Vista support

Derivatives

Cygnix is a limited X11 environment based on Cygwin. MinGW ( Minimalist GNU for Windows) formerly mingw32, is a native software port of the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC to Microsoft Windows Secure Shell or SSH is a Network protocol that allows data to be exchanged using a Secure channel between two networked devices Telnet ( Tel ecommunication net work is a Network protocol used on the Internet or local area network (LAN connections The PlayStation Portable (officially abbreviated PSP) is a Handheld game console manufactured and marketed by Sony Computer Entertainment. OpenGL ( Open G raphics L ibrary is a standard specification defining a cross-language Cross-platform API for writing applications that produce Windows Vista (ˈvɪstə is a line of Operating systems developed by Microsoft for use on Personal computers including home and business desktops Its name is an abbreviation of "CYGnus pseudo-uNIX".

There are implementations of Cygnix in Windows 95 / 98 / ME, Windows NT / 2000 / XP, and AmigaOS 4. Windows 95 is a consumer-oriented Graphical user interface -based Operating system. Windows 98 ( codenamed Memphis) is a graphical Operating system released on 25 June 1998 by Microsoft and the successor to Windows 95 Windows Millennium Edition, or Windows Me (IPA pronunciation, iː is a hybrid 16-bit / 32-bit graphical Operating system released on 14 September Windows NT is a family of Operating systems produced by Microsoft, the first version of which was released in July 1993 Windows 2000 (also referred to as Win2K) is a preemptive, interruptible graphical and business-oriented Operating system designed to work with Windows XP is a family of 32-bit and 64-bit Operating systems produced by Microsoft for use on Personal computers including home and AmigaOS is the default native Operating system of the Amiga personal computer 0.

Additions to Cygwin

Extensions to Cygwin are available, such as Cygwin/X, a port of the X Window System, and in turn, the KDE Desktop as KDE on Cygwin. Cygwin/X is an implementation of the X Window System that runs under Microsoft Windows. KDE ( K Desktop Environment) (ˌkeɪdiːˈiː is a Free software project which aims to be a powerful system for an easy-to-use Desktop environment. KDE on Cygwin is the port of Qt and KDE Desktop environment (both of which are commonly distributed natively in Linux Operating systems However KDE on Cygwin has been phased out as KDE 4 is being ported natively on Windows. KDE 4 is the current series of releases of the K Desktop Environment.

Alternatives to Cygwin

Several open-source and proprietary alternatives are available for people who need simultaneous access to both MS Windows and UNIX environments on the same hardware.

Other UNIX emulators for Windows

Toolsets like Microsoft Windows Services for UNIX, MKS Toolkit, UnxUtils, GnuWin32 and UWIN aim to provide a complete POSIX like environment, as does Cygwin. Microsoft Windows Services for UNIX ( SFU) is a software package produced by Microsoft which provides a Unix subsystem and other parts of a full Unix MKS Toolkit is a software package produced and maintained by MKS Inc UnxUtils is a collection of ports of common GNU Unix -like utilities to native Win32, with Executables only depending The GnuWin32 project provides native ports in the form of runnable computer programs patches and source code for various GNU and Open source tools and UWIN is a Computer software package created by David They implement at least a shell, several utilities, including the familiar UNIX compiler tools, including make and the cc commandline interface to the C programming environment. In Software development, make is a utility for automatically building executable programs from Source code. tags please moot on the talk page first! --> In Computing, C is a general-purpose cross-platform block structured UnxUtils only provides a subset, as it restricts itself to use only the features provided by the Microsoft C Runtime environment. UnxUtils is a collection of ports of common GNU Unix -like utilities to native Win32, with Executables only depending

Programming tools

MinGW on the contrary, only provides the set of GNU Programming tools, without the interactive environment, with which to port UNIX applications to Windows. MinGW ( Minimalist GNU for Windows) formerly mingw32, is a native software port of the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC to Microsoft Windows GNU ( pronounced) is a computer Operating system composed entirely of Free software.

It is also possible to develop applications based on a cross-platform toolkit like Qt, PWLib, allowing those applications to be compiled on either platform and provide users with the same experience. Qt (pronounced "cute" by its creators is a Cross-platform application development framework widely used for the development of GUI programs (in which PWLib is a multi-platform C++ class library Programs based on PWLib can run on both Microsoft Windows and Unix/Linux

Reverse approach

A radically different approach is available with Wine (software), which is a re-implementation of the Windows API and toolset for Linux and similar systems, while virtualisation engines like VMware and Xen allow Windows and Linux or UNIX to run concurrently on top of a hypervisor microkernel. Wine is a free Software application which aims to allow Unix-like computer Operating systems on the X86 architecture to execute VMware Inc ( is a Software developer and a global leader in the Virtualization market Xen is a virtual machine monitor for IA-32, X86, X86-64, IA-64 and PowerPC 970 architectures In Computing, a hypervisor, also called virtual machine monitor, is a virtualization platform that allows multiple Operating systems to run on A microkernel is a minimal Computer Operating system kernel which in its purest form provides no operating-system services at all only the Finally, Cooperative Linux was created to run just Windows and Linux simultaneously on the same hardware. Cooperative Linux, abbreviated as coLinux, is software which allows Microsoft Windows and the Linux kernel to run simultaneously in parallel on the same

See also

• Cooperative Linux
• Cygwin/X
• Xming
• andLinux

References

External links

• Cygwin Home
• Cygwin page on Freshmeat.net
• Cygnix project
• cygwin.dll with Unicode support
• Cygwin Wikia. Freshmeat is a Website that allows computer users to keep track of the latest software releases and updates as well as write/read reviews and articles send or receive comments Wikia (originally Wikicities) is a selective Free web hosting service for Wikis (or Wiki farm) operated by Wikia Inc

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