Unix Tools for Windows Systems
Many programmers who got their initial experience on Unix systems and subsequently crossed over into the PC world wished for a nice Unix-like environment (especially when faced with the horrors of the MS-DOS command line!), so it's not surprising that several Unix shell-style interfaces to small-computer operating systems have appeared.
In the past several years, we've seen not just shell clones, but also entire Unix environments. Two of them use bash and ksh93. Another provides its own shell reimplementation. This section describes each environment in turn (in alphabetical order), along with contact and Internet download information.
Cygwin
Cygnus Consulting (now Red Hat) created the cygwin environment. First creating cgywin.dll, a shared library that provides
Unix system call emulation, the company ported a large number of GNU
utilities to various versions of Microsoft Windows. The emulation
includes TCP/IP networking with the Berkeley socket API. The greatest
functionality comes under Windows/NT, Windows 2000, and Windows XP,
although the environment can and does work under Windows 95/98/ME, as
well.
The cygwin environment uses
bash for its shell, GCC for its C
compiler, and the rest of the GNU utilities for its Unix toolset. A
sophisticated mount command
provides a mapping of the Windows C:\path notation to Unix filenames.
The starting point for the cygwin project is http://www.cygwin.com/. The first thing to download is an installer program. Upon running ...
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