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Windows Developer Power Tools
book

Windows Developer Power Tools

by James Avery, Jim Holmes
December 2006
Intermediate to advanced
1312 pages
35h 17m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Windows Developer Power Tools

23.14 Bringing POSIX Emulation to Windows with Cygwin

While Windows may be fine for certain kinds of tasks, it is not very big on POSIX compatibility. POSIX (see http://www.opengroup.org/austin/papers/posix_faq.html) is a set of portability standards for services and APIs provided by operating systems, mostly compatible with Unix. Most GNU software expects to be built on POSIX targets.

If you’ve ever wanted to compile or run open source software under Windows, chances are you’ve heard of Cygwin. Cygwin (pronounced ‘sig-win or sig-‘win) is a POSIX emulation layer for Windows. It allows most Unix scripts to run and applications to build from source out of the box, with very little porting effort.

Perhaps the biggest benefit is for developers who have worked on Unix or Linux systems in the past. Cygwin brings the wealth of power in *nix tools such as sed, awk, and many others to the Windows platform.

Cygwin at a Glance

Tool

Cygwin

Version covered

1.5.20

Home page

http://www.cygwin.com

Power Tools page

http://www.windevpowertools.com/tools/176

Summary

Provides a POSIX compatibility layer to allow building of POSIX-compliant applications

License type

GPL

Online resources

FAQ, mailing lists

Getting Started

Cygwin works with all officially released 32-bit x86 versions of Windows since Windows 95, with the exception of Windows CE.

The recommended way to install and update Cygwin is by using the Cygwin setup ...

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Publisher Resources

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