Recipe 2.4. Enhancing Windows Development with Cygwin

Problem

Although you do most of your development on Windows, you're aware of the command-line tools available under Linux and OS X, including the GNU development tools. You want a way to incorporate these tools into your Windows environment.

Solution

Download and install Cygwin fromhttp://www.cygwin.com. Once installed, running Cygwin may look similar to the default Windows terminal program (cmd.exe). What you'll find though, is that it's a much more powerful command-line environment from where you can launch hundreds of other useful development tools.

Point your browser tohttp://www.cygwin.com/setup.exe to install a setup program that walks you through the Cygwin install. The program asks a few questions about your environment: for example, which users you want to make Cygwin available to, and what network settings you want the installer to use when downloading packages.

Next, you'll be presented with a long list of packages. Specify which ones you want to install on your system. Many of these packages are deselected by default, so to change the default installation options for a package, click in the New column for a specific package. Doing so toggles between skipping the package or installing a specific version (sometimes several versions are available).

Once you've completed the installation wizard, you can always rerun it and go get packages that weren't installed initially.

Discussion

Cygwin makes it possible to have a GNU/Linux-like environment within Windows. Users who are productive with the Unix/Linux command line, but find themselves using Windows for one reason or another, should install Cygwin before doing anything else.

Cygwin makes almost 800 software packages available to you under Windows, and best of all, they're all free. For a complete and current list of the available packages, visit http://cygwin.com/packages.

The Cygwin installation is definitely unobtrusive software. If you decide it's not for you or that you want to remove some installed packages, you can easily remove packages from the directory you specified for packages or remove the main Cygwin directory (something like C:\cygwin) altogether.

See Also

• Section 1.8"