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.
| |
|---|---|
Tool | Cygwin |
Version covered | 1.5.20 |
Home page | |
Power Tools page | |
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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