Cygwin 1.7 Released

jensend writes "The 1.7 branch of Cygwin, the Unix-like environment for Windows, has reached stable status after about 3 1/2 years of effort. Among many other changes, this release drops support for Windows 9x. Since the NT API and NT-based versions of Windows are more capable and somewhat less of a mismatch with POSIX (for instance, they include a security model), this has allowed for code path simplifications, better performance (particularly noticeable with pipe I/O), better security, and better POSIX compatibility."

Comments

One question remains...

[gzipped_tar]

... Does it run under WINE?

Re:One question remains...

[DMUTPeregrine]

Yes, Cygwin does run under WINE. And WINE runs under Cygwin. It can be an amusing stress test.

Re:One question remains...

[Anonymous Coward]

since when does WINE run under cygwin?

Re:One question remains...

[TheRaven64]

I've not been following either project actively for a while, but back around 2001 someone had WINE running under Cygwin with some patches to both. I presume that these have been incorporated into the respective projects by now.

Re:One question remains...

[digitalaudiorock]

Yes, Cygwin does run under WINE. And WINE runs under Cygwin. It can be an amusing stress test.

...now mix that with a dialup modem connection over VOIP and we'll really be getting somewhere.

Re:One question remains...

[David Gerard]

Cygwin does run in Wine, but Wine doesn't actually run under Cygwin as yet, or even compile. Helpers wanted!

Re:One question remains...

[fm6]

OK, I'll bite: what's the utility of providing a compatibility layer for APIs that are already available in the native form?

Re:One question remains...

[David Gerard]

Very little. The main reason for Cygwin on Wine is to test the quality of both. The main reason for Wine on Cygwin is to make Wine more cross-platform (as opposed to Linux, Linux and Linux), and BECAUSE WE CAN DO THIS WRONG AND BAD THING!

There's the excuse that we could use it to support stuff on newer versions of Windows that they don't support natively, or to support XP apps better than Win7 does or whatever. But really, it's because it's BAD AND WRONG and therefore fun. What's not to like?

That said, I haven't played with it in *ages* because my work machine is now Ubuntu and I don't have a handy XP or Win7 box around. But! There's endless evil to wreak for someone with too much time on their hands! You'll also make Wine more robustly cross-platformable, which is good.

Merry Fucking Christmas!

[Anonymous Coward]

What are you nerds doing still working??

Isn't there some kind of /. Santa tracker or something??

Oh wait a minute. Slashdot is run by Jews. That explains everything.

Re:Merry Fucking Christmas!

[tyrione]

What are you nerds doing still working??

Isn't there some kind of /. Santa tracker or something??

Oh wait a minute. Slashdot is run by Jews. That explains everything.

Marduk has them all on a short leash.

Re:Merry Fucking Christmas!

[Anonymous Coward]

As a result of an overwhelming lack of requests, and with research
  help from that renowned scientific journal SPY magazine (January, 1990)
  --here is the annual scientific inquiry into Santa Claus.

  1) No known species of reindeer can fly. BUT there are 300,000 species
  of living organisms yet to be classified, and while most of these are
  insects and germs, this does not COMPLETELY rule out flying reindeer
  which only Santa has ever seen.

  2) There are 2 billion children (persons under 18) in the world. BUT
  since Santa doesn't (appear) to handle the Muslim, Hindu, Jewish and
  Buddhist children, that reduces the workload to 15% of the total - 378
  million according to the Population Reference Reference Bureau. At an
  average (census) rate of 3.5 children per household, that's 91.8 million
  homes. One presumes there's at least one good child in each.

  3) Santa has 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different
  time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming he travels east to west
  (which seems logical). This works out to 822.6 visits per second. This is
  to say that for each Christian household with good children, Santa has
  1/1000th of a second to park, hop out of the sleigh, jump down the chimney,
  fill the stockings, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat
  whatever snacks have been left, get back up the chimney, get back into the
  sleigh and move on to the next house. Assuming that each of these 91.8
  millions stops are evenly distributed around the earth (which, of course,
  we know to be false but for the purposes of our calculations we will
  accept), we are now talking about .78 miles per household, a total trip of
  75-1/2 million miles, not counting stops to do what most of us must do at
  least once every 31 hours, plus feeding and etc.

  This means that Santa's sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second, 3,000
  times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest man-made
  vehicle on earth, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 27.4 miles per
  second - a conventional reindeer can run, tops, 15 miles per hour.

  4) The payload on the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming
  that each child gets nothing more than a medium-sized lego set (2 pounds),
  the sleigh is carrying 321,300 tons, not counting Santa, who is invariably
  described as overweight. On land, conventional reindeer can pull no more
  than 300 pounds. Even granting that "flying reindeer" (see point #1) could
  pull TEN TIMES the normal amount, we cannot do the job with eight, or even
  nine. We need 214,200 reindeer. This increases the payload - not even
  counting the weight of the sleigh - to 353,430 tons. Again, for
  comparison - this is four times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth.

  5) 353,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air
  resistance - this will heat the reindeer up in the same fashion as
  spacecraft re-entering the earth's atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer
  will absorb 14.3 QUINTILLION joules of energy. Per second. Each. In
  short, they will burst into flame almost instantaneously, exposing the
  reindeer behind them, and create deafening sonic booms in their wake. The
  entire reindeer team will be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second.
  Santa, meanwhile, will be subjected to centrifugal forces 17,500.06 times
  greater than gravity. A 250-pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim)
  would be pinned to the back of his sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force.

  In conclusion - If Santa ever DID deliver presents on Christmas Eve, he's
  dead now. Merry X-mas.

Re:Merry Fucking Christmas!

[JWSmythe]

    This does not take into account his advanced distribution network, planetary time dilation field generator, and bag of infinite holding.

    With those tools in place, every present can be delivered in what would appear to be a fraction of a second to us. He doesn't do it all by himself. The "Santa Claus" image is actually a generalization of the appearance of an advanced species. They handle the delivery, assigned sectors based on population of "good" children. They stopped the "bad" children delivery of coal decades ago to optimize the delivery patterns.

    The reindeer are a common question posed. They are not in fact reindeer. They the antigravity and propulsion systems, simply shaped to look like reindeer and a sleigh.

    Did I mention that the entities known as "Santa Claus" is also not of this world, but brings happiness and joy to the juvenile population of the planet. It is, of course, a conspiracy where the children are being educated to be "good" obedient servants for when the harvesting time comes. When that happens, they will take the "good" children between the ages of 8 to 18, and put them to work on the alien masters ships.

    I for one welcome our alien Santa Claus overlords. More over, I hereby request a ride off this rock.

Re:Merry Fucking Christmas!

[Anonymous Coward]

What are you trolls doing still working??

Isn't there some kind of troll Christmas party or something??

Oh wait a minute. Trolls are Jews. That explains everything.

Re:Merry Fucking Christmas!

[JustOK]

Reindeer is redundant. The root rein is Scandinavian for 'reindeer', so reindeer translates to 'reindeer deer'.

Re:Merry Fucking Christmas!

[Anonymous Coward]

Haha. Kinda reminds me of Table Mesa Dr. in Boulder, CO. (mesa means table). Table Table. Mesa mesa.

Does this do something SFU doesn't?

[SanityInAnarchy]

Windows has had a POSIX layer of its own for awhile now, as "Services for Unix".

On the lighter-weight end, mingw can give you the basics, and they usually run much faster (even bash!) than Cygwin did. Maybe Cygwin is better now, it's just that I don't really see what it has over, well, any other way of running POSIX apps on Windows.

Re:Does this do something SFU doesn't?

[LoRdTAW]

A bash shell and a great collection of Unix command line tools. Its how I backup my Vista box to my Linux server via ssh.

Re:Does this do something SFU doesn't?

[Dwedit]

I once tried out Services For Unix. I then attempted to build GNU Tar, but couldn't figure out how to make the integrated Unzip part of it work, so I gave up. That's too bad, since Cygwin royally sucks at fork.

Re:Does this do something SFU doesn't?

[SanityInAnarchy]

Mingw has both of these, and is much faster, last I checked.

Re:Does this do something SFU doesn't?

[Darkness404]

Yeah, but Services For Unix seem to be coming to an end. The download says it won't work on Vista or 7, and the Wikipedia page says it will stop being downloadable at the end of 2009.

Re:Does this do something SFU doesn't?

[Genocaust]

Why not something less convoluted like andLinux? I used Cygwin when I first started tinkering with Linux when I was young, but there are so many better alternatives at this point I don't understand why it's still around.

Re:Does this do something SFU doesn't?

[R.Mo_Robert]

The biggest--perhaps only--reason I install Cygwin on Windows is because so many cross-platform applications require it for compilation (Mozilla, I'm looking at you). Of course, whether they coud ue MinGW and/or the Windows "Services for Unix" layer to accomplish something similar is another story, but until they decide to change and support it, Cygwin it is.

And personally, having had to install Cygwin, I've never even paid attention to the POSIX layer for Windows, but it looks like it might be worth looking into. I think part of the reason some projects use Cygwin owes to their current or not-to-far-in-the-past support of Windows 9x/Me (the POSIX layer, of course, is only for the NT family) and probably no benefit (or perhaps even more problems, having to work out compatibility issues with yet another set of tools) from changing.

Re:Does this do something SFU doesn't?

[Anonymous Coward]

Works fine for me on Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit.

Re:Does this do something SFU doesn't?

[yuhong]

Which is correct. Windows Server 2003 R2, Vista Enterprise and higher editions have the successor Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications (SUA) available as optional install that replaces SFU.

Re:Does this do something SFU doesn't?

[yuhong]

But if you have that edition SUA should be available, which should be much better than SFU and should be used instead

Re:Does this do something SFU doesn't?

[Anonymous Coward]

One big advantage is that you are not depending on Microsoft to provide the layer. But more often than not it's not your decision as Cygwin is a compile dependency.

Re:Does this do something SFU doesn't?

[BitZtream]

Its called something else now, in typical MS style. Can't remember the new name off the top of my head.

They also dropped the NIS or NFS server, perhaps both. Added an ssh server maybe? I can't remember exactly, I haven't dealt with it recently.

Re:Does this do something SFU doesn't?

[yuhong]

It is Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications (SUA), and it is available in Windows Server 2003 R2 and later, and Vista Enterprise and higher editions. The server components of SUA is I think only available in the server versions of Windows.

Re:Does this do something SFU doesn't?

[bcat24]

andLinux only supports 32-bit versions of Windows, for one thing. I'd like to give it a spin on my 64-bit Windows 7 desktop, but I can't. Cygwin may not be ideal, but it has the advantage of actually being usable by me. :)

Re:Does this do something SFU doesn't?

[AlexLibman]

Cigwin has traditionally been slower than SFU, but it's MUCH easier to install lots of packages without having to figure out how to fix pkgsrc compilation problems and so on. I find that having an actual UNIX box to ssh to (physical or emulated) is the best solution of all.

Re:Does this do something SFU doesn't?

[shutdown -p now]

SFU (now called SUA, "Subsystem for Unix Applications") is rather good, but the problem with it is that it is only present in Enterprise and Ultimate editions of Vista/7, or in 2008. Since most people use Home or Professional, they can't get it. This is a problem when porting applications, since now your port requires Enterprise/Ultimate.

With Cygwin, a ported application not only runs on any version of Windows, but you don't require the user to install the runtime before running it - you just package Cygwin DLLs with your binaries, and that's it.

SUA is supposed to be used for porting "legacy" in-house Unix applications. It does also make for a decent Unix shell and basic tool set for Windows if you can afford it, but aside from that, it's in a rather different niche from Cygwin. They are complimentary.

Re:Does this do something SFU doesn't?

[shutdown -p now]

SUA is SFU, just a more recent version of it (that specifically supports Vista+).

Re:Does this do something SFU doesn't?

[nimble]

MinGW does not have a bash shell, because it provides nowhere near the level of Unix compatibility required for bash (as that's not the aim of the project). There is an MSYS version of bash, but MSYS in fact is a (more or less unmaintained) fork of Cygwin 1.3.

Re:Does this do something SFU doesn't?

[cbhacking]

They are complimentary.

Just don't try running them side-by-side without a lot of tweaking. Both use a handful of system environment variables, with a number of collisions (PATH being an obvious one). Cygwin binaries are just wimple Win32 programs (exe/dll extension and all) while SUA binaries are not (they are true POSIX applications, although they use the PE binary format), but since SUA shells will also execute Win32 applications, typing something as simple as "ls" can be ambiguous - is it SUA's /bin/ls or Cygwin's /bin/ls.exe?

I had the bloody hardest time getting SUA working on a friend's machine once, until I realized he used Cygwin already. At that point I told him to just stick with one or the other per system - there's not enough advantage, and too much hassle, to having them installed on the same box.

Re:Does this do something SFU doesn't?

[cbhacking]

Mingw may be faster than Cygwin (not hard), but I'd be surprised if it's faster than Interix (SFU/SUA). Interix binaries are "native" in the same sense that Win32 binaries are (technically speaking the NT kernel doesn't support either Win32 or POSIX syscalls directly; that's what its subsystems are for).

Furthermore, Interix is simultaneously better integrated with the OS and uses more *NIX-type behavior (case-sensitive UNIX-path filesystem, allows any extension or none at all on executables, etc.) Frankly, I also found it to be less of a hassle to set up than mingw.

To echo the thread-starter's question: what does it do that Interix doesn't, or what does it do better?

Re:Does this do something SFU doesn't?

[cbhacking]

You missed the part of the Wikipedia page that pointed out the Subsystem for UNIX Applications (SUA) which is the same feature on Vista, Win7, Server 2003 - 2008 R2, and presumeably future releases. There's no sign of it going away soon.

I use SUA (which, aside from install mechanic, is functionally identical to SFU plus some new features) all the time on Win7. My main CLI shell is bash (pinned to my taskbar), I use ssh more often than remote desktop, I use subversion in Interix rather than something like TortoiseSVN, and I once completed a substantial programming project (involving a multi-threaded, multi-process, networked program for embedded Linux) by developing (and testing) on Interix before (testing and) deploying on Linux. It was substantially easier than rebooting, virtualizing, or working remotely on my school's Linux servers.

Re:Does this do something SFU doesn't?

[cheesybagel]

Last time I tried installing SFU it failed so badly I could not even do an 'ls'.

Besides, if it does not have X11 and all the trimmings of a Linux distro it is not that much use. You need both a working SFU and something like darwinports or fink. Which does not exist AFAIK.

Oh, also, the Cygwin GCC can compile native Win32 programs if you choose it so, which will run on machines without Cygwin installed. That makes it useful all in itself. Before Visual C++ Express was available GCC was the only decent free compiler you could get. It still matters if you have a complex cross-platform application you want to compile using GCCisms (e.g. AT&T assembly notation, C99).

Re:Does this do something SFU doesn't?

[nimble]

Things that Cygwin does better than SFU (as in what's on offer from MS. Dunno about community projects on top of that.)

- The latest version is available for all Windows (>=NT) variants, not just Enterprise and Ultimate.
- It's more compatible with GNU/Linux extensions (since SFU is not aimed at that).
- It's open source with open development, short release cycle, and responsive mailing list.
- Package system. (It's no apt-get, but it does its job, including dependency resolution and updates.)
- Bigger, more recent choice of packages. For example gcc, is 4.3 vs. SFU's 3.3.
- Bash and zsh.
- A usable default shell configuration. The arrow keys don't even work correctly in SFU's default ksh setup. (It's as if MS deliberately try to scare people off Unix.)
- A choice of terminals to replace the awful Windows console.

Also, what do you base your claim of SFU's better Windows integration on? Since Cygwin's based on the Windows API rather than being confined to its own subsystem, it can offer features like /dev/clipboard or /proc/registry, and it allows programs to mix POSIX and Win32 calls.

Finally, Cygwin 1.7 does also support case sensitivity on NFS and on NTFS volumes that have that feature enabled.

Re:Does this do something SFU doesn't?

[nimble]

How exactly can andLinux be described as less convoluted than either Cygwin or SFU? Instead of just the C/POSIX libraries, you also get most of a Linux kernel sitting on top of the Windows kernel.

Re:Does this do something SFU doesn't?

[Eravnrekaree]

thats a naive statement. Cygwin can be extremely useful for installing and using Linux programs if for some reason you are stuck on Windows XP, without needing to dual boot or install Linux seperaretely. Yes you have to recompile the programs for cygwin and the cygwins support for APIs could be better but it can be a really useful idea. The other alternative is to run Linux under a VM which could use a lot more of you system resources compared to cygwin, plus having to boot an entirely another OS. Furthermore if you run X apps, these apps can be top level windows on your Windows desktop, not inside a VM window. Cygwin can be useful for developers for maintaining one code base and allowing it to run on Windows and Unix, rather than maintaining seperate versions.

Re:Does this do something SFU doesn't?

[Anonymous Coward]

Simply because they finally decided 'So Fuck U' wasn't going down to well.

Re:Does this do something SFU doesn't?

[kill-1]

Mozilla's build environment for Windows is based on MinGW for quite some time now.

Re:Does this do something SFU doesn't?

[SharpFang]

A couple thousands of binaries of Linux apps installable with a couple of clicks, integrating with the system and each other?

How long, since you decide you want to, until you can start writing, compiling and running GCC, perl, python and such apps, on "Services for Unix"? On Cygwin it's about 20 minutes from which 15 you spend drinking coffee watching the progress bars.

Re:Does this do something SFU doesn't?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's Subsystem for Unix-based Applications. There are two editions: a client edition (Vista, Windows 7) and a server edition (Server 2008). The client edition contains, well, clients; the server edition contains servers. This is probably where you got the idea that NIS and NFS servers are no longer supported: they are, but only in the server edition of SUA.

Re:Does this do something SFU doesn't?

[R.Mo_Robert]

Shows how long it's been since I've built Mozilla on Windows...glad to see the new system looks a bit better.

Re:Does this do something SFU doesn't?

[Anonymous Coward]

You need both a working SFU and something like darwinports or fink. Which does not exist AFAIK.

Uhm, SFU/SUA gives you BSD-style pkg_* tools, and NetBSD's pkgSRC has been ported to it (see the Interix port).

f it does not have X11 and all the trimmings

It actually does have X11 (server), you just need one of the many freely available X11 clients for Windows. It won't supply you with the whole breath of available applications, though pkgsrc and pkg_* provide a fair deal of apps, even considering that the purpose of SFU itself is mostly as a migration and interop tool. Though it offers much better integration with the win32 subsystem by virtue of its design, and implementation (and that it runs along side win32, as a native, parallel subsystem) and much better performance.

Before Visual C++ Express was available GCC was the only decent free compiler you could get.

Other than ICC (on Intel) and SunStudio (on AMD).

I always found that Cygwin is decent if either a) you need more than MinGW, b) don't know about SFU/SUA or c) specifically want a Linux-like environment rather than a Unux environment.

Re:Does this do something SFU doesn't?

[Genocaust]

I'm not sure I understand the point you're trying to make? While this post makes a good point about andLinux not supporting x64 yet, I'm not sure what your argument against it in favor of Cygwin is. It's not a VM or a dual boot. It runs in tandem with Windows, just like Cygwin, only more seamlessly (imo).

Re:Does this do something SFU doesn't?

[Genocaust]

When I say convoluted I speak in terms of user experience, not the underlying services. Using andLinux is far simpler and more seamlessly integrated than Cygwin is, imo.

Re:Does this do something SFU doesn't?

[MightyMartian]

It's Subsystem for Unix-based Applications. There are two editions: a client edition (Vista, Windows 7) and a server edition (Server 2008). The client edition contains, well, clients; the server edition contains servers. This is probably where you got the idea that NIS and NFS servers are no longer supported: they are, but only in the server edition of SUA.

Microsoft, fucking up userland since 1992.

Re:Does this do something SFU doesn't?

[nimble]

With andLinux you have to go through the Linux boot process. Windows files have to be accessed through network shares. User accounts are separate. Windows and andLinux processes live in two completely separate environments, which means you can't combine tools through pipes and such. And it's more resource-intensive due to having to duplicate a lot of kernel-level functionality.

Don't get me wrong, andLinux is great technology, lighter than a VM, and the right tool if you're looking for maximum Linux compatibility. But claiming that it's more seamlessly integrated into Windows than either Cygwin or SFU is a nonsense.

Re:Does this do something SFU doesn't?

[Anonymous Coward]

I love tweaking! gotta watch out, though. A couple months ago, I was doing some crystal meth while watching some porn. I jacked off for 6 hours straight. My dick was in pain for two weeks.

Re:Does this do something SFU doesn't?

[higuita]

and it works like sh*t...

i used it to have nfs from a linux server and worked by several months... then one day the nfs stop worked...all others unix servers could work with the nfs, only the SFU one stop working...

after 2 days trying to debug and solve the problem, openned a service request at microsoft. 2 weeks later and after several tests, reinstalls, reboots and such still didnt work.

the MS support were always saying that they had little experience with SFU, that no one used it, etc, etc

i finally gave up and workaround with a samba server exporting a nfs share... ugly, but at least works

Re:Does this do something SFU doesn't?

[buchner.johannes]

I don't like coffee, that's why Cygwin is a no-go for me. They should change that installer.

Re:Does this do something SFU doesn't?

[kabloom]

I guess he must feel that the benifit of "seamless integration" is obtained by having a rootless X server running on Windows. Surely, one could employ a rootless X server with Cygwin and get the same experience.

Re:Does this do something SFU doesn't?

[poached]

But can you get SUA for Windows Vista/7 non enterprise or ultimate editions?

I couldn't and I'm using Home edition.

Re:Does this do something SFU doesn't?

[Haeleth]

It includes an X server, for one thing.

Re:Does this do something SFU doesn't?

[petermgreen]

you just package Cygwin DLLs with your binaries, and that's it.
Then the user another app with a different version of the cygwin dll (or installs cygwin on thier system) and due to the way cygwin uses shared memory to emulate posix stuff things tend to start crashing when two versions of the dll are loaded at once.

Also iirc the license for the main cygwin library is GPL with a linking exception for other FOSS licenses so if your software is not FOSS then afaict you would need a special license to do what you propose in a compliant manner.

Re:Does this do something SFU doesn't?

[cgf]

you just package Cygwin DLLs with your binaries, and that's it.
Then the user another app with a different version of the cygwin dll (or installs cygwin on thier system) and due to the way cygwin uses shared memory to emulate posix stuff things tend to start crashing when two versions of the dll are loaded at once.

The new 1.7.1 version of Cygwin allows multiple versions of Cygwin to coexist.

Re:Does this do something SFU doesn't?

[cbhacking]

That's the damn catch. MS apparently figures that few enough people need SUA that they can use it as an incentive to sell the highest (most expensive) editions. I disagree with this philosophy - I think that the whole feature should be more highlighted, and more available - but they didn't ask me.

Incidentally, all editions of Windows Server can use it, and students can get Windows Server 2008 Standard Edition from http://dreamspark.com/ Since Server is essentially a superset of the functionality in the Client builds, if you want fancy features but don't want to buy Ultimate (and you're a student) then getting Server is probably the best bet.

makes windows marginally bearable

[pydev]

Even after all these years, Microsoft has nothing equivalent to the UNIX command line. The standard cmd.exe is too limited, and Powershell isn't a good interactive shell, it's more like typing at a Python or Ruby interpreter. Cygwin makes doing anything on Windows marginally tolerable and I install it on any Windows machine I happen to use.

Re:makes windows marginally bearable

[Zephiris]

Microsoft has had Interix, then Services For UNIX, and now Subsystem for Unix Applications originally since around 2000 but both SFU/SUA and Cygwin are pretty much just different shells on top of the limited cmd.exe window, unless you happen to use rxvt (which is usually not worth the trouble).

SFU 3.5 and now SUA for Server 2003 R2 and newer (including Vista and Windows 7) were free of charge, but it was comparable in most versions pay-or-not to MKS Toolkit and UWIN, rather than Cygwin and MingW (which are definitely more open-sourcey).

Re:makes windows marginally bearable

[AmberBlackCat]

I just can't see any reason myself or an average Windows user would need a UNIX command line on their Windows computer. In fact, I think the whole point of Windows is to get away from the command line.

Re:makes windows marginally bearable

[Hes Nikke]

back when i had windows on my desk, i installed cygwin and used putty to ssh into itself. Now I use cygwin to ssh into my only windows server.

Re:makes windows marginally bearable

[NormalVisual]

Because the Windows command line blows. There are still plenty of situations where a command line is preferable on Windows, and I'd keep Cygwin on it just to have non-brain-dead command history functionality, if for no other reason.

Re:makes windows marginally bearable

[osu-neko]

Microsoft has had Interix, then Services For UNIX, and now Subsystem for Unix Applications originally since around 2000 but both SFU/SUA and Cygwin are pretty much just different shells on top of the limited cmd.exe window, unless you happen to use rxvt (which is usually not worth the trouble).

*blink* *blink*

It never even occurred to me that anyone would NOT use rxvt or some other Unix terminal program if they bothered to go through the effort of installing Cygwin. That would be... kinda pointless I would think. Do you even install Xwindows at all then? If not... are you sure you wanted any sort of Unix compatibility to begin with? o.O

Re:makes windows marginally bearable

[osu-neko]

There are people who say always use the command line. Then there are people who say always use the GUI. All of these people are idiots. Use whatever works best for the task at hand. Sometimes a command line-based solution works best. Sometimes a nice GUI does. You can have more than one tool in a toolbox...

Re:makes windows marginally bearable

[timmarhy]

err no, the commandline blows BECAUSE they want you to use the gui, not the other way around. does your dogs tail wag your dog ?

Re:makes windows marginally bearable

[maitai]

More than one tool could also mean using Windows for the GUI (which I prefer) or Unix for the command line (which is why I have this headless Unix box sitting beside my desktop).

Happy Unix user (command line only, dislike X) since 1987.

Re:makes windows marginally bearable

[Anonymous Coward]

I just can't see any reason myself or an average Windows user would need a UNIX command line on their Windows computer.

Consider the task of converting a few thousand files from one format to another. The average Windows user will spend hours doing it by hand or spend a lot of money on a special purpose tool to do such conversions. If they're really smart, they may spend a lot of time and cobble something together in VisualBasic. That's the Windows way: slow, cumbersome, and expensive.

In fact, I think the whole point of Windows is to get away from the command line.

The whole and entire point of Windows is to make money for Microsoft, to tie you inextricably to their platform, and to make sure that your thinking becomes so warped that you can't possibly use anything else. I'd say they are succeeding.

Re:makes windows marginally bearable

[heffrey]

The gnu toolset can compiled natively on Windows so why would you want to use cygwin as a shell?

Re:makes windows marginally bearable

[Anonymous Coward]

Native ports don't quite have correct semantics. In addition, Cygwin provides better packaging and far more complete coverage.

Re:makes windows marginally bearable

[RAMMS EIN]

I just can't see any reason myself or an average Windows user would need a UNIX command line on their Windows computer. In fact, I think the whole point of Windows is to get away from the command line.

I don't see it that way. I don't see a point in getting away from the command line. Some things are most easily or quickly done or explained with the command line, just as other things are most easily or quickly done or explained using windows, icons, menus and a pointer. It's good to have good support for both in your system.

The way I see it, the point of Windows, from a customer's perspective, is to run Windows applications. That is the one thing Windows does better than any other operating system out there.

Re:makes windows marginally bearable

[RDaneel2]

No, SFU/SUA is not the same as Cygwin... it is an implementation of a POSIX(?) userland that sits directly on top of the NT kernel. Also unlike Cygwin, it does not rely on the Win32 subsystem. It comes with numerous GNU, System V, and BSD utilities. One of its design goals is to be "source compatible", so that in general only a recompile of Unix apps is required. And I, like many others, would like to know when the release of all the actual tools for Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 version of SUA will show up... it has now been over 2 months since general release of Windows 7. Sigh.

Re:makes windows marginally bearable

[bvankuik]

If you think about it, it is almost unbelievable that Microsoft would release a new shell, then mak it not POSIX compliant. Almos defy OS for the last couple of decades has aimed for POSIX compliancy. Then when they build a shell, they ignore that and go on their own way. I wonder what would have happened if they just tried to conform.

A lot of sysadmins who are fluent with shell scripting, could have jumped in and have a huge advantage administering Windows machines. A lot of free utilities could easily be ported. And Windows admins could just pick up any of the gajillion resources on Shell scripting, or visit a local Unix user group to pick up tricks.

I know Powershell has lots of hooks that apps can hook into; that's basically the equivalent of Linux' D-Bus system.

Re:makes windows marginally bearable

[lena_10326]

...but both SFU/SUA and Cygwin are pretty much just different shells on top of the limited cmd.exe window, unless you happen to use rxvt (which is usually not worth the trouble).

What are you talking about? First, only lobotomized moron monkeys would use CMD.EXE. Second, put this

C:\cygwin\bin\rxvt.exe -e /bin/bash --login

into a windows short cut. Set "Start in" to c:\cygwin\bin and it works just fine. Now, how much work was that? Have you got 2 minutes to spare out of your day? Quit your bitchin. Wuss.

What I use:

C:\cygwin\bin\rxvt.exe -geometry 132x60+0+0 -fn "FixedSys" -e /bin/bash --login

because the default font is ugly.

Re:makes windows marginally bearable

[lena_10326]

I just can't see any reason myself or an average Windows user would need a UNIX command line

If you are a developer or sysadmin who deals with data, then you use the command line. You can take several hundred log files, run them through 1 liner piped commands (find, grep, xargs, awk, sed, perl, sort, uniq, wc, head, tail, etc), output a CSV file, and pop it into Excel in about 10-20 minutes. Try doing that with only Excel and you'll be there all day.

Re:makes windows marginally bearable

[amRadioHed]

It's fine if they want you to use the GUI, make a superior way to do things in the GUI and people will use it. Making the command line interface so lousy that people will actually prefer a half-assed GUI is not the right way to go about doing things.

Re:makes windows marginally bearable

[lena_10326]

By the way...

Re:makes windows marginally bearable (Score:1, Troll)
by Zephiris (788562) Alter Relationship on Thursday December 24, @11:43PM (#30549412) Homepage

Looks like some asshole got mod points and went to town again.

Re:makes windows marginally bearable

[selven]

What's with all this hatred of the command line? The command line is an interface, just like the graphical one, and it is a very powerful interface that can do things GUIs will never do (how do you even try to make a full (not just if x in the line sub y with z) GUI for sed without making it a textbox?)

Re:makes windows marginally bearable

[cbhacking]

While it requires the higher editions of Windows (XP Pro, Vista/7 Enterprise or Ultimate, any Server edition), you must have missed the presence of the POSIX subsystem in NT (it's been there since the first releases of the OS, incidentally). Called the Subsystem for UNIX Applications (SUA) on recent versions, or Services For UNIX (SFU) on XP and before, the POSIX subsystem is free on supported Windows and includes a decent operating environment called Interix.

Interix includes a few hundred libraries and utilities, mostly BSD derived or SVR5-derived (you can choose which lineage you want at install) but also including things like the GNU build toolchain (gcc 3 and 4, with support for at least C, C++, and Fortran; I haven't tried any others). Additionally, you can install a package manager and an expanded/updated collection of tools and software from http://suacommunity.com/sua.aspx. Manpages are also included (both for bundled software and Interix packages).

Bash (along with other shells such as zsh) is available from suacommunity. Interix ships with csh and ksh. I use Interix bash as my standard Windows command line these days, including running Windows CLI utilities. I also run Python and Ruby interpreters from within Interix (suacommunity packages). You can even run graphical applications if you have an X server such as xming (the suacommunity bootstrapper will offer to install it).

If you have a version of Windows that supports the POSIX subsystem (businesses mostly will), I recommend it over Cygwin. For one thing, you get true *NIX behavior - executables are marked by permissions bits, not by extensions, the filesystem is case-sensitive (technically an install option for Interix, but one you definitely want), and you get UNIX-style permissions including working setUID and setGID (having a working sudo makes using the command line on a non-Administrator Windows session much more pleasant).

Re:makes windows marginally bearable

[daveime]

For *nix users, however, the reverse is usually true.

Making the half-assed GUI so lousy that people will actually prefer a command line interface is not the right way to go about doing things

Re:makes windows marginally bearable

[Anonymous Coward]

True. Where i work, my coworkers would try to write a C# app to do it. Command line stuff is bad form.

Re:makes windows marginally bearable

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks! I hated running bash through cmd, this is 1000x better! Made my day.

Re:makes windows marginally bearable

[NearlyHeadless]

I used to use rxvt, but I couldn't get Unicode to work in it, so I switched to puttycyg.

Re:makes windows marginally bearable

[EvanED]

I can do one better... I don't really even use the Cygwin shells most of the time. I have Cygwin installed because it has a ton of other utilities... you get Grep, Sed, Flex and Bison, GCC, GNU Make, etc.

(For the curious, I don't really use the Cgywin shells because I find Cygwin doesn't integrate all that well with the rest of the system. You can't easily copy-and-paste paths back and forth (at least Cygwin->native apps), Cygwin's environment variable translations of paths is incomplete, etc. I therefor try to stick with native stuff as much as possible. I *do* use a different terminal emulator though; the default one with Windows is a piece of shit.)

Re:makes windows marginally bearable

[barrkel]

Copy and paste: getclip and putclip. But I usually abbreviate them to p and c with a couple of wrappers.

I find Cygwin integrates really well with the rest of Windows, particularly when you mount the right drives in directories off the root, so that you have /c/ etc., but still have access to Win32 apps. I practically live in my bash/rxvt shell.

Re:makes windows marginally bearable

[EvanED]

Copy and paste: getclip and putclip. But I usually abbreviate them to p and c with a couple of wrappers.

You're missing the point. I'm not saying Cygwin can't access the clipboard, I'm saying that you can't copy and paste paths (probably the most common things I'm pasting into a shell) because they're in a different format. Cygwin paths are adorned with the extra /cygdrive, and the different slash conventions will sometimes cause things to not work.

Re:makes windows marginally bearable

[NormalVisual]

I don't really care what Microsoft wants - there are still many, many situations where a command line is much quicker and more efficient than the UI (deleting a thousand files with the same extension, for instance), and Microsoft has failed miserably at providing an adequate shell.

Re:makes windows marginally bearable

[ClosedSource]

"The standard cmd.exe is too limited, and Powershell isn't a good interactive shell, it's more like typing at a Python or Ruby interpreter"

Well, it sounds like you simply like the UNIX command line and define it as command-line "goodness". No problem with that, but some people consider the UNIX command line to not be powerful enough and prefer Powershell.

Re:makes windows marginally bearable

[ClosedSource]

I don't think it's that simple. The DOS command line hasn't changed all that much and it's original implementation was based on having a system with 16K or RAM and no hard drive.

Once Windows came along, there wasn't a lot of reason to improve DOS, but that's not the same thing as trying to force you to use the GUI.

Re:makes windows marginally bearable

[FrankieBaby1986]

Show me how to do

$mkdir Project\ {1..10}

In a GUI. As one excruciatingly simple example of how a CLI can be much more useful and expressive than a GUI.

Re:makes windows marginally bearable

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm pretty sure I remember when NT came out that Microsoft intended the command-line to actually be a viable alternative for many tasks, and it was indeed enhanced. AFAIK those enhancements are still present in 2k/XP/Vista/7...so it would seem that their lack of use is because they were still insufficient or just too clunky to be desirable to use.

Having a usable GUI certainly doesn't preclude having a fully functional command line. OS X definitely demonstrates it, and modern Linux desktops arguably do.

I'll definitely admit that in some cases, it's obvious that Microsoft would prefer you use the GUI alternative. In particular, using the IDE vs. command-line to develop native Windows GUI applications using Microsoft's development tools...

Re:makes windows marginally bearable

[nneonneo]

The cygpath utility converts paths back and forth between Windows and POSIX formats.

$ cygpath -w /bin/ls
C:\cygwin\bin\ls

$ cygpath "C:\WINDOWS\System32"
/cygdrive/c/WINDOWS/System32

Re:makes windows marginally bearable

[nneonneo]

I use MinTTY, which comes with Cygwin. It also supports Unicode, and I have a keyboard shortcut to launch MinTTY from any open Windows Explorer window, which makes a lot of command-line use easier.

Re:makes windows marginally bearable

[MightyMartian]

NT's CLI was enhanced, but was still so shitty that it was like the original Bourne Shell's retarded cousin. Haven't played around with the latest MS shells. Most of the heavy lifting I do these days is in *nix, so I have some of the best shells ever developed for scripting. For the Active Directory domain controllers, I do use VBScript, because I can at least do date and string processing and the like with something resembling a sane language. But every time I've got to do something in NT batch language, it just demonstrates how much Microsoft didn't get it, and for how long they didn't get it.

Re:makes windows marginally bearable

[fm6]

I'm not a Mac guy, but I seem to recall that Apple never provided a command line either. The one they have now came for free when they switched to using NextStep OS, which got it for free from the Mach OS, which got it for free from BSD.

Re:makes windows marginally bearable

[EvanED]

The point isn't that it's hard to do, or anything like that; but it is an extra step. If you're in a Cygwin shell, you can't tab-complete an absolute path and pass it as an argument to a Windows program. At best you do something like $(cygpath -w /blah/blah). By contrast, you can (at least usually) pass absolute Windows paths as arguments to Cygwin utilities.

As far as I'm concerned, the Windows shell provides most of the stuff I want from a shell... redirection, pipes, tab completion, etc. It even has loops, though I haven't bothered to learn the syntax yet and just drop into Bash when I want to do an interactive loop. The main thing I miss is Bash's reverse incremental search.

Re:makes windows marginally bearable

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a much better terminal called mintty which has become very popular, I haven't used rxvt since
it arrived.

Re:makes windows marginally bearable

[nimble]

You can greatly reduce the need for (mental and actual) path conversion by installing Cygwin into C:\. It's not officially recommended, but it actually works rather well. This way, you also get Windows path completion, e.g. C:/W followed by TAB will complete to C:/Windows, because bash completion ignores the C: bit. Windows programs do generally accept forward slashes in paths (and Cygwin programs usually accept backward slashes too, but bash won't complete those). Also, you can type something like '\bin\ssh server' into the start menu's run box, because C: is implicitly assumed.

Re:makes windows marginally bearable

[EvanED]

That's an interesting idea... I'll have to keep it in mind. Maybe I'll give it a shot. I would kinda like to be able to use ZSH.

Re:makes windows marginally bearable

[Zephiris]

rxvt just obviously isn't the default, and if somebody went through all of the trouble of installing and configuring X11 for Cygwin (which isn't even required for rxvt, or at least never used to be), wouldn't either A( running a VM, or B( actually installing a UNIX-like OS be the more natural option? UNIX != X11.

It's also lovely when people naturally assume that somebody saying 'not usually worth the trouble' means 'impossible for the writer to understand'.

Re:makes windows marginally bearable

[Zephiris]

I never said it was the same, I was pointing out to the parent that both use the same broken cmd.exe terminal window by default.

Yes yes, and SUA was, and likely still is, given greater POSIX compliancy rating than Linux or FreeBSD by the government.

It's easy to say 'source compatible', but all that really means is that it hopefully conforms to some subset of relevant specifications of varying ages (such as UNIX98 or SUSv3).
A great many (particularly smaller) applications specifically target Linux, which can bring equal trouble in trying to get them to compile or run on Cygwin, SUA, *BSD, Solaris, or what-have-you. Standards compliance doesn't seem to be looked on too favorably by terribly many programmers today.

Re:makes windows marginally bearable

[Zephiris]

Good day to you too.

Given as of one of the last earth shattering maintainence releases (circa 2007), rxvt was about as useful as boiled spinach with nearly as many faults as the default, including deficiencies with copy-paste, extra-slow redrawing, and just as many problems with the various available curses libraries.
I never said it was 'hard' to have it use rxvt, just that it wasn't especially worth it, by which I was particularly referring to 'the average person likely to install it'. I imagine some poor worker being told by their bosses that machines that can run fancy virtumimimal machines are too expensive for everyone to have, and needing some quick sed/awk/gcc light testing further than what the lightly maintained MSYS can provide.

Next time I'm forced to recompile some router firmware in linux-running virtual machine because of case sensitivity, source compatibility, utility issues, and generally quagmired times to execute any variety of long scripts, I'll be sure to remember that somebody mentioned how to add a shortcut to cygwin for rxvt. Not obvious at all, that.
I'd prefer it if people were to read (and bother to notice context of reply) before hatchet-jobbing.

Re:makes windows marginally bearable

[MightyMartian]

I'm not sure how you could define something like Bash as "not powerful enough". I haven't seen any kind of automation that couldn't be done in it. I'll admit off the top that I haven't really done much in Powershell, but rather than have to learn Yet Another Microsoft Scripting Language, why the fuck don't they just implement their own native port of Bash? It's like they have this extreme allergy to Unix.

Re:makes windows marginally bearable

[Sigma 7]

(deleting a thousand files with the same extension, for instance), and Microsoft has failed miserably at providing an adequate shell.

I find del *.jpg to be sufficient. In some more advanced usage of the cmd shell, Mozilla has a set of .bat files that detect the locations of MSVC in order to setup the build environment, and it works in most cases. After digging the appropriate registry key, you can then run the make file to get things started.

It's an artifact from MS-DOS, and around that time, there were custom utilities meant to augment batch files, such as Batchman. They never appeared as "standard" because of the 640K barrier.

Of course, the command line paradigm breaks down if command line utilities just plain suck, such as the ones that silently fail a certain task. Meanwhile, I'm writing my own program for alpha channel compositing.

Re:makes windows marginally bearable

[Sigma 7]

The gnu toolset can compiled natively on Windows

At one time, I tried compiling Bash under MinGW. Step 1 required running ./configure, which required bash to already be compiled. It's easier just using either MSYS or Cygwin, since downloading the binary package is generally faster than figuring out the correct method of compiling if bash is not yet installed.

Re:makes windows marginally bearable

[IICV]

A real life example: someone at work asked me to get a list of all the files in a certain directory whose names contained the word "change". That was just "find -iname "change" ./". How would you do that in Windows?

Re:makes windows marginally bearable

[ClosedSource]

"why the fuck don't they just implement their own native port of Bash? It's like they have this extreme allergy to Unix."

Why the fuck do UNIX fan-boys think that Unix is the ultimate OS? Perhaps because most of them only have experience in two OS families: UNIX/BSD/Linux/OSx and Windows.

Re:makes windows marginally bearable

[nimble]

Yep, rxvt is dead. Use mintty instead: native Windows UI with context menu and options dialog, Unicode support, xterm compatibility, transparency. No X required.

Re:makes windows marginally bearable

[MightyMartian]

Because Unix is pretty much a standard when it comes to CLI development and usage. Microsoft has essentially made a retarded version of the Unix shell environment. Why not just make a reasonably compatible port of Bash, or hell, ksh for that matter. I mean, the point of Microsoft selling products is to try to widen their market, so why do they always insist on doing things in their own, often extremely awkward and semi-brain dead way. Why the fuck create a major server OS only to have it hobbled this way?

I'm not saying "get rid of cmd.exe". But surely a multi-billion dollar company like Microsoft could dedicate a few resources to do a decent port of Unix sh. It would make my life a lot easier.

Re:makes windows marginally bearable

[nurb432]

They did for a while.. "unix services for windows". Seems to still be around:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=896C9688-601B-44F1-81A4-02878FF11778&displaylang=en.

Re:makes windows marginally bearable

[ClosedSource]

"Because Unix is pretty much a standard when it comes to CLI development and usage."

Yes, the UNIX CLI is the standard CLI for UNIX. Let Windows be Windows and UNIX be UNIX.

Re:makes windows marginally bearable

[Lord Crc]

I don't know exactly how find -iname works (and I'm too lazy to read man pages), but based on your description something like this could work:

for /r /d %a in (*change*) do dir "%a"

Re:makes windows marginally bearable

[lena_10326]

I'm sorry. I didn't realize you were an idiot. Pardon my reply earlier. Carry on... (with whatever silly thing you were blabbering on about).

Re:makes windows marginally bearable

[Thundersnatch]

Or you can write perhaps five lines of VBA inside Excel and accomplish the same task with one tool. You could be shot for even enabling VBA of course, but whatver negative things you want to say about Excel, it does have lots of functionality.

Re:makes windows marginally bearable

[bakker Bart]

Making the half-assed GUI so lousy that people will actually prefer a command line interface is not the right way to go about doing things

Say, did you ever wonder why we have written and spoken language and have kids go through years of trouble mastering them? It's because a language with grammar has great symbol manipulating power. Much more than pointing at things. Imagine going through your daily communications with Pictionary. I do not want to play Pictionary with my computer systems. I know very well what I want, and I know how to express it in a symbol manipulation language, that's why I use a shell. It is not because of a lack of a proper GUI that I do that. It's because written language works so much better than Pictionary. And when I do use GUI's (on X11), I find I can have features that Win/Mac won't give me. Proper input focus models (e.g. scrolling in arbitrary windows without giving them input focus). Real copy-paste via the X selection buffer (instead of the select-copy-position-paste operation).

Re:makes windows marginally bearable

[TheRaven64]

If you're counting PowerShell as a command line, then AppleScript would count too. It can access objects exported by applications and communicate with them from either an interactive shell or a pre-parsed script.

Re:makes windows marginally bearable

[fm6]

I'm not counting powershell as a command line. I suppose you could use it that way, but using it requires too much .NET knowledge to make it suitable for basic interaction.

Re:makes windows marginally bearable

[Asian Freud]

Sometimes all I need is X Window, and it just works on cygwin last few years.

In fact I don't bother to use the rest of the tools. Most have decent Windows port.

Do we finally have unicode support?

[Dwedit]

For a while, I've been using a modified version of Cygwin in order to get proper UTF-8 support. Does the new version finally integrate a similar feature?

Re:Do we finally have unicode support?

[dj_tla]

From the 1.7 release announcement:

- Default character set is now UTF-8, but other character sets are supported via an improved internationalization support.

Full of what's new / changed.

Re:Do we finally have unicode support?

[s1lverg1ow]

The release announcement page says "Default character set is now UTF-8..." Maybe you will install 1.7 and tell us how good the implementation is?

Re:Do we finally have unicode support?

[OverlordQ]

RTFA:

- Default character set is now UTF-8, but other character sets are
    supported via an improved internationalization support. See
    http://cygwin.com/cygwin-ug-net/setup-locale.html

search!

[spongman]

love the search feature in setup.exe !! long overdue, but welcome nonetheless.

Re:search!

[Phillip2]

The dialog is still terrible but you are right this makes it reasonably bearable. Been a long time coming..

sweet!

[yup2000]

This is really great - I was setting up rsync and ssh on my parents computer a couple days ago as part of a backup system. I was having a problem with rsync hanging on a 2GB pst file, but the new cygwin brings rsync up to date, and whatdoya know... it works! Now my openbsd box happily backs up their stuff!

min req windows

[Anonymous Coward]

who actually uses this... it REQUIRES windows?

Re:min req windows

[MichaelSmith]

Its handy if you have to run windows at work but you need unix services.

Re:min req windows

[BitterOak]

who actually uses this... it REQUIRES windows?

I know. I've been hoping for years they'll release a version for Linux, but they never do.

Re:min req windows

[Nethead]

+1 orc

And I have mod point I could have applied.

Re:min req windows

[compro01]

It works well using WINE.

Yes.

[amake]

Yes. From the announcement:

- Default character set is now UTF-8, but other character sets are
    supported via an improved internationalization support. See
    http://cygwin.com/cygwin-ug-net/setup-locale.html

Re:Yes.

[nimble]

I think the Unicode and internationalization support is the most important improvement in 1.7, making it much more useful for people who need more than ASCII. There's been a lot of under-the-hood work to convert the Cygwin internals from using Windows "ANSI" APIs to Unicode APIs. Cygwin's filesystem will automatically translate between Windows filenames, which are encoded as UTF-16, and POSIX filenames, which are encoded as UTF-8 or whatever other charset you might have selected.

So, it there an app...

[Anonymous Coward]

...that can make Cygwin look and feel like Windows? I prefer the Windows look and feel instead.

Re:So, it there an app...

[nimble]

Mintty. Available from http://mintty.googlecode.com/ or under 'Shells' in Cygwin's setup.exe.

Cygwin and Windows

[Anonymous Coward]

Yay! With Cygwin, you can take good, reliable, high-quality software and run it on a shitty OS! Woohoo! I bet they had to work so hard to be able to do that, too.

I was never really impressed

[bsDaemon]

Let's be honest -- whether Linux or BSD is ready for the desktop, ready for the laptop is something slightly lacking, and I mostly have laptops these days. I couldn't take it anymore with Linux or BSD on my laptop, so I bought Vista. Of course, I can't live without a command line, because that's what I'm used to. I remembered having used Cygwin years ago, back in the Win95 days, and so I tried to give it ago.

No dice -- it doesn't really integrate with the rest of the system very well, I find. Maybe I'm just not doing it right, but whatever. Then I gave up and grabbed SFU off of Microsoft's website. It was OK, but not really stellar. It's more for running batch jobs and giving something to code against than for interactive use, same as Cygwin I guess.

Eventually I got so pissed sick of it all that I just bought a MacBook Pro so that I could have a Unix-ish environment without having to worry about power management or weird wifi issues that I'd had with Fedora, CentOS, Ubuntu, Slackware, ZenWalk, Mint, FreeBSD, OpenBSD and PC-BSD on the Toshiba hardware.

So, I guess my question is -- is Cygwin meant for interactive use, or just to give the POSIX API and build environment so you can see whether or not your code will compile against a Unix machine? Because it seems like they've been putting an awful lot of effort into this for a very long time for it to suck so bad if its meant to be an interactive method of accessing a Windows machine by Unix commands.

Re:I was never really impressed

[jhol13]

I use it entirely for interactive use. It is not very good for testing "does it compile in Unix" as it is not that compatible with modern distros.

The default setting does require a bit tinkering and it does have some issues[1], but other than that it is pretty good command line.

[1] Usually with Windows commands - they insist not to work with paths (take them as command switches), symbolic links, etc.

Re:I was never really impressed

[RAMMS EIN]

I don't think Cygwin is "meant to be an interactive method of accessing a Windows machine by Unix commands" so much as it is a Unix/POSIX/GNU compatibility layer for Windows, similar to how WINE is a Windows compatibility layer for *nix. Both of them allow you, to a limited extent, to run software written for the other set of APIs.

Re:I was never really impressed

[plasticsquirrel]

Cygwin isn't meant to give you all the Linux or Windows system features, just provide a full-featured POSIX emulation layer (at its core, just one DLL), and programs compiled for that. You may still need to use Windows utilities to access Windows-specific features that have no POSIX implementation. However, the important thing is that it basically gives Unix developers a common platform, so anything developed for general Unix systems will compile on Cygwin's POSIX emulation layer.

Since Cygwin basically throws you into a command shell, it really does require an understanding of the fundamentals of Unix/Linux systems and how to work effectively in a shell. For example, I doubt many users of Slackware or NetBSD would have any substantial complaints about Cygwin. As someone who used Cygwin for years in a corporate environment where I could not use Linux, it was a godsend. I could spend my whole day working in Cygwin without having to mess with Windows development environments. Being able to throw together a bash script that uses grep, sed, awk, etc. is so nice for a stranded Linux user. However, many people do not learn the basic utilities anymore, even basic things such as customizing a login shell.

If there is a weak point in the Cygwin interactive experience, in my opinion it comes from the fact that the default Windows terminal program is used, which is slow and generally terrible compared to the modern Linux terminal apps. Maybe someday there will be a fast and full-featured replacement. But as it is, the Windows terminal is basically sluggish early 90's cruft that just isn't up to the task. Not a fault of Cygwin, but still a problem when running any such programs on Windows.

Re:I was never really impressed

[onefriedrice]

so that I could have a Unix-ish environment without having to worry about power management or weird wifi issues that I'd had with Fedora, CentOS, Ubuntu, Slackware, ZenWalk, Mint, FreeBSD, OpenBSD and PC-BSD...

No, I'm sorry. The correct answer is "BeOS."

Re:I was never really impressed

[nimble]

Good post. Regarding the last point about the default console, Cygwin ships with a number of replacement terminals: (u)rxvt, xterm, mintty. Mintty in particular provides a native Windows interface with Unicode support and does not require an X server. More at http://mintty.googlecode.com/

Re:I was never really impressed

[bsDaemon]

I'm quite proficient with tcsh and bash and many command-line utlitiies. On a real *nix system, I'm extremely happy. I think I just found there to be a lack of integration that was getting in my way and it was probably due to my perception of what it was supposed to be vs what it actually was.

Re:I was never really impressed

[larry bagina]

If you don't want weird power management or wifi support because there is none, go with BeOS. If you don't want weird power management or wifi support because they just work, go with OS X.

Re:I was never really impressed

[plasticsquirrel]

That's awesome. Mintty is exactly what I always wanted for Cygwin: a PuTTY style native Windows terminal with Unicode, no X prerequisite, etc.

I wonder if Cygwin really has much of a future

[Anonymous Coward]

It used to be if I wanted to run some Linux code under Windows I'd have to have a Linux box nearby, boot into Linux, or deal with Cygwin. I've never really enjoyed using Cygwin it's a pain to use, maintain, work with, and code for. There are lots of subtle differences in how your code behaves when you go from Linux to Cygwin (for example, re-writing someone's entire program because they liked to use lots of mallocs and Cygwin mallocs are unbelievably slow).

At this point though you can either run VMware, get a full Linux distro, and have easier access to your local Windows files (via a local share) than Cygwin's fun mapping scheme (/cygdrive what now?). Or you can even run an EC2 instance. Cygwin was never painless enough to make it worth while to use, if I needed to do something in Linux I'd rather use a real Linux box.

I don't think most people really miss the command line utilities enough to want to go through the hassle of using Cygwin (I hate the install process btw)... but then again I don't like using Linux as my desktop. I'd rather just use Windows or OS X and ssh into my Linux clusters as needed.

Re:I wonder if Cygwin really has much of a future

[shutdown -p now]

The point of Cygwin is to relatively easily port Unix (including Linux) applications to Windows, without doing major rewrites. The result isn't optimal, performance-wise, but it often gets the job done, and the end user doesn't even need to know that it's running on top of Cygwin (he only sees the DLL, but that's it).

If you want a shell that builds on (and further extends) Unix principles, and is well-integrated into Windows, you should really use PowerShell.

Re:I wonder if Cygwin really has much of a future

[junglee_iitk]

Running vim under xterm is awesome. And without using 1 thousand fifteen zillion megabyte of memory to run andLinux...

I have tried almost everything and always come back to cygwin. Virtualbox takes care of the remote cases.

Personally, I am not too excited about v1.7, since I had pretty bad experiences with the beta as late as 2-3 months ago.

Re:I wonder if Cygwin really has much of a future

[Anonymous Coward]

Powershell:

PS C:\Users\CmdrTaco> slashdot
The term 'slashdot' is not recognized as the name of a cmdlet, function, script file, or operable program. Check the spelling of the name, or if a path was included, verify that the path is correct and try again.
At line:1 char:9
+ slashdot <<<<
+ CategoryInfo : ObjectNotFound: (slashdot:String) [], CommandNotFoundException
+ FullyQualifiedErrorId : CommandNotFoundException

Yes... much more intuitive than a UNIX shell. Not!

Re:I wonder if Cygwin really has much of a future

[Eravnrekaree]

The compatability issues with Cygwin never really doing things very well with supporting POSIX is a big problem, it seems like Cygwin that somewhat defective is good enough. if they could just go a little bit further they could make most stuff work out of the box, they have gone almost 100% there why they stop at 95% i dont know.

It also is a serious problem that Cygwin does not support case sensitive file names which can screw up some Unix stuff. There are ways they could do this by doing a simple filesystem layer that would store the case sensitive names in cygwins own directory files.

Re:I wonder if Cygwin really has much of a future

[nimble]

Cygwin 1.7 does support case-sensitive filenames. See the User's Guide on how to enable it: http://www.cygwin.com/cygwin-ug-net/using-specialnames.html#pathnames-casesensitive It's also had various other improvements in terms of POSIX compatibility, for example, characters not allowed in Windows filenames can now be used in Cygwin. Another one is that mount points are now stored in /etc/fstab rather than the registry. See the What's New section for lots more improvements: http://cygwin.com/cygwin-ug-net/ov-new1.7.html The Cygwin developers do have an official Linux compatibility goal, and fixes are going in all the time, but of course it's never going to be perfect, partly due to limitations of the underlying platform, and partly due to lack of (wo)manpower.

Re:I wonder if Cygwin really has much of a future

[Daniel Serodio]

One of the first things I install on a new work computer is Cygwin.
What's wrong with the install process? It's a pretty much standard "Next, Next, Next" Windows install.

Two things that I do after installation for better integration with the Windows environment is creating /c, /d, etc symlinks to /cygdrive/c, cygdrive/d, etc and making Cygwin's "/home" a symlink to C:\Documents and Settings or C:\Users

Re:I wonder if Cygwin really has much of a future

[cgf]

We "stopped at 95%" because we were supporting Window 9x. Once we stopped doing that we could make use of the features available in more sophisticated versions of Windows.

But, of course, there are some things that are just very hard to do in Windows no matter what version. That's why some things are not implemented.

simpler explanation is

[BhaKi]

The people who run Slashdot are not religious.

Re:simpler explanation is

[Virak]

That sounds exactly like what a Jewdot editor would say. I knew it, you're one of them too!

Re:simpler explanation is

[Anonymous Coward]

Yo are wrong, they are Pastafarians.

Re:simpler explanation is

[timothy]

Some are, some aren't; I'm in the 2d camp, and insomniac, and stupidly single, hence this reply.

timothy

Re:simpler explanation is

[JustOK]

Thank God for atheists!

Re:simpler explanation is

[Hal_Porter]

OMG! I knew the original slashdotters - the ones with IPO money and girlfriends - mistreated you but putting you in "Camp 2D" seems a bit harsher than expected. I thought they just chained you to the server to keep you 'editing' when they were out meeting with celebrities and doing drugs.

Re:simpler explanation is

[TangoMargarine]

He must be new around here...

Re:simpler explanation is

[pudge_confirmer]

You are new around here, aren't you?

Re:simpler explanation is

[timothy]

Once in a while they let me into the "yard," which is still just a patch of concrete painted green. But it's the little things that keep you going ...

timothy

Compared to MingW,

[BhaKi]

cygwin SUCKS. Cygwin tools' functionality is a small subset of GNU utilities. MingW, OTOH, is a complete port of GNU to Windows.

Re:Compared to MingW,

[Anonymous Coward]

Erm, it's the other way round. Cygwin provides a fairly complete GNU environment, whereas MinGW stands for "Minimalist GNU for Windows" and primarily provides gcc for plain Windows without attempting full POSIX compatibility. Hence Unix programs can usually be compiled with little change on Cygwin, whereas with MinGW a substantial porting effort is often required.

MinGW actually ships with Cygwin. There's also MSYS, which is a fork of Cygwin 1.3.

Re:Compared to MingW,

[jilles]

What do you mean small subset, you can compile and install KDE and x.org on Cygwin. Pointless I agree, but most common place unix commandline stuff compiles and works on cygwin. I used to depend on cygwin to make life a bit more tolerable when I was still depending on windows laptops for development. There's something called puttycyg which is a fork of putty with some cygwin stuff compiled in that really improves the terminal experience (bash in a dos window kind of sucks).

I never noticed any performance issues. But then I don't do much performance critical work on the commandline. A few simple greps, ls and wc commands and the odd bash script to automate some stuff.

Re:Compared to MingW,

[Eravnrekaree]

Another im not sure you considered is running Cygwins X server and running xterm or some other X11 terminal emulator on windows. works well.

Have they changed the icon?

[fredrickleo]

I know it sounds stupid but I hate the Cygwin icon, it looks like a Windows 3.1 app.

Re:Have they changed the icon?

[Anonymous Coward]

I know it sounds stupid but I hate the Cygwin icon, it looks like a Windows 3.1 app.

The icon symbolizes the current state of "Linux on the Desktop".

Re:Have they changed the icon?

[jabbathewocket]

Linux on the desktop is fine, linux for the mass market is a WHOLE OTHER KETTLE OF FISH!

Re:Have they changed the icon?

[El_Oscuro]

Just get the gnome-terminal or konsole icon file from your favorite Linux distro. Save it as a .ico (Windows can't handle .xpm or .png icons) and use that. Bake it into your install files so it is easy to set up and you are golden.

Dont be hatin on Christmas

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn theres a lotta haters here.
Cygwin is nowhere near as huge as those 'alternatives' you are giving and its great for windozers to learn about linux.
And anyway, andlinux sucks because it doesn't let you smash the stack :-(

Re:Dont be hatin on Christmas

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed. Cygwin is painless, minimal and sufficient for typical command line operations. The Cygwin X server is workable as well. Does what it says on the tin without grabbing hundreds of megs of RAM to do it.

Re:Dont be hatin on Christmas

[MightyMartian]

It's a dog at performance, no doubt, but it was good enough even seven or eight years ago that I could compile a Radius server on it to serve dialup users coming in on a Cisco AS5200. Even being a bit slow, it beat the hell out of the shitty Radius server that came with Server 2000.

This is how I feel about a lot of MS "interoperability" stuff. It all seems semi-busted or only half-implemented. Yes, you can use the Posix userland, but not for much. Cygwin fills a major hole, the ability to use standard Unix tools like Bash, the GNU userland and even some daemon stuff on a Windows box.

oh bollox - he uses amazon these days

[Barsteward]

so his work load will be smaller and more manageable, and there are rumours that he's been cloned

Too expensive!

[Anonymous Coward]

Breakout licenses for cygwin are just too friggin' expensive.

makes windows marginally interactive.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Even after all these years, Microsoft has nothing equivalent to the UNIX command line. The standard cmd.exe is too limited, and Powershell isn't a good interactive shell, it's more like typing at a Python or Ruby interpreter."

Well as Lisp has taught us, sometimes that's all you need.

Porting Unix applications to MS Windows

[Per Abrahamsen]

I'm pretty sure the main purpose is for porting Unix applications to MS Windows, and/or for maintaining a common build environment for the two platforms. At least that is what I use it for. I actually compile with MinGW as the application itself have very few OS dependencies, Cygwin "just" provides the pure build environment.

I also used to use Cygwin/X11 to provide a Unix like interactive programming environment, but as the MS version of GNU Emacs is quite good these days, and GNU Emacs itself provide most of the common environment I need, I don't bother with that anymore.

Did they simplify fork()?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because of NT's POSIX subsystem (later exposed as Services for Unix or Services for Unix Applications), the NT kernel natively supports a fork() type operation.. My recollection is that Cygwin totally ignores this and does its own non-copy-on-write version of fork(), presumably because it was written in the days when Win95 and Win98 were common. Anyone know if they've corrected this?

Re:Did they simplify fork()?

[nimble]

Cygwin can't use the NT fork support, because it's implemented on top of Win32, and NT's fork does not support Win32 DLLs. Obviously that is a significant disadvantage, particularly during fork-heavy 'configure' runs, but there are also advantages that approach too, e.g. it allows things like /dev/clipboard for accessing the clipboard and /proc/registry for accessing the registry. It also means that Cygwin programs can mix POSIX and Win32 calls, so when porting from Unix to Windows you can take a gradual approach, or just port the UI only.

Re:Did they simplify fork()?

[TheRaven64]

Now that they are dropping Win9x support, they can use NT kernel system calls to implement fork(), rather than the high-level Win32 calls. This might be a bit better. These are the same low-level calls used to implement fork() in the POSIX subsystem.

That said, it's much better to avoid using fork(). It isn't particularly efficient on any platform (and hasn't been since about 1975) and doesn't work on things like the Symbian POSIX layer. Use system() or popen() instead of fork() if at all possible. vfork() is implemented with setjmp()/longjmp() and system() in cygwin, so it's also reasonably fast.

Re:Did they simplify fork()?

[nimble]

I don't really know the details, but the possibility of using the underlying NT calls to implement fork has been discussed a lot on the Cygwin mailing list, and the conclusion was that it won't work for Win32-level processes. Dropping down into a separate subsystem like SFU would require a major redesign and would break binary compatibility for everything as well as source compatibility for Cygwin programs that use Win32 themselves, e.g. rxvt or mintty.

Good points about avoiding fork where possible. spawn() is another way to do that.

Re:Did they simplify fork()?

[TheRaven64]

I'm not talking about using a different subsystem, I'm talking about using the low-level NT system calls. The POSIX, OS/2 and Win32 subsystems are all implemented on top of the same core set of system calls. These are not well documented - they are not part of the public APIs - but they are compatible with all NT-series kernels and are exposed in a usable way via the Nt* family of calls. You can use them with any of the subsystems, because all of the subsystems are implemented in terms of them.

Re:Did they simplify fork()?

[barrkel]

Yes, but the Win32 loader - to take a single example - does not necessarily know how to handle copy-on-write pages logically (idata or bss) mapped in from DLLs, which is what would need to happen in a proper fork() scenario.

Re:Did they simplify fork()?

[cgf]

Now that they are dropping Win9x support, they can use NT kernel system calls to implement fork(), rather than the high-level Win32 calls. This might be a bit better.

It should be no surprise that most of the comments in this thread are rehashes of 12+ years of history of "Why don't they just do ...?"

We'll happily accept a patch which implements fork using low-level NT semantics since all of our efforts in finding the right sequence of calls to make this work have proved to be for naught.

is the library compatibility problem fixed?

[Anonymous Coward]

Something that annoyed me about cygwin in the past was that if one version is running and you then run something that loads a different cygwin library version, it all stops working... I have to reboot to get anything cygwin to work again.

Re:is the library compatibility problem fixed?

[nimble]

Yep, a scheme for keeping processes using different Cygwin DLLs out of each other's way has been implemented. Just don't expect them to interact with each other, e.g. you can't send signals from one Cygwin sandbox to another. That's why the best approach still is to have only one Cygwin DLL on your system.

WINE / Cygwin

[DrYak]

since when does WINE run under cygwin?

It works both ways, although buggy and not fully functional.
And as reported by parent poster, this two redundant monsters are used as test cases to assist developers in perfecting both software stacks (by investigating said bugs and lack of functionality)

It's a fucking Christmas miracle

[wampus]

Now they'll let me put it on our production 2008 boxes. No more RDP to do every little thing!

Recommended alternative terminal program?

[Dwedit]

The Windows command interpreter sucks as a terminal program. What's a good alternative for use with Cygwin? I'd prefer Unicode support, so I don't see question marks on all non-ascii filenames.

Re:Recommended alternative terminal program?

[nimble]

urxvt or xterm if you want to run X, mintty or puttycyg if you don't.

Re:Recommended alternative terminal program?

[schnablebg]

Console, a very nice application that has tabs, sane copy/paste functionality, and can be configured to launch bash or whatever you want. Not sure about Unicode.

Re:Recommended alternative terminal program?

[linuxguy]

puttycyg

http://code.google.com/p/puttycyg/

There's an App for that?

[ClosedSource]

"Consider the task of converting a few thousand files from one format to another. The average Windows user will spend hours doing it by hand or spend a lot of money on a special purpose tool to do such conversions. If they're really smart, they may spend a lot of time and cobble something together in VisualBasic. That's the Windows way: slow, cumbersome, and expensive."

You mean there's a UNIX utility you can launch fom the command line that will convert a file from any arbitrary format to another arbitrary format without having to obtain a special purpose tool? What do they call it?

Re:There's an App for that?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sed, awk, and Perl.

Re:There's an App for that?

[ClosedSource]

So what's the command line option for any of those that allows you to say convert ASCII to EBCDIC without writing any code or scripts.

After all, the complaint about Windows was that you had to use a special purpose tool or write some code to convert your files.

Re:There's an App for that?

[petermgreen]

You mean there's a UNIX utility you can launch fom the command line that will convert a file from any arbitrary format to another arbitrary format without having to obtain a special purpose tool? What do they call it?
The point is on the *nix command line* once I find a series of commands (which may or my not be part of the basic install) that do what I want I can quickly throw them together into a script, surround them with a script loop and throw them at every file in a directory.

In a graphical environment (or an interaction driven text environment but those seem to have mostly died off) there is no such easy way to go from a manual procedure to an automated one. If you are lucky the task is contained within one app. If you are unlucky you have to either do every file manually, find a tool designed to support batch processsing or break out a full-blown programming language and find suitable libraries to use with it (which is FAR FAR more effort than turning a sequence of commands into a shell script).

*Dos style batch files can do this to an extent but afaict they are far more limited and more importantly the command line tools simply aren't there on the windows side and more importantly there is a distinct lack of good windows command line apps. i've never tried the new powershell stuff so I can't comment on how good or bad it is.

Cygwin kicks butt

[linuxguy]

I am surprised that there are so many Cygwin haters out here. I install it on every Windows machine I own. Life would be very difficult without it. I did find the Windows command console that Cygwin uses, very limiting. Cut-n-paste is extremely painful. However I discovered puttycyg http://code.google.com/p/puttycyg/ that provides the putty interface for Cygwin. And now I don't have much to complain about.

For those talking about Services For Unix, does SFU provide all the tools (latest version of Subversion client/server, SSH client/server etc) that Cygwin provides? I don't think so.
Is SFU under continuous development, like Cygwin? I don't think so.

Cygwin is an excellent piece of software, specially when used with puttycyg.

Microsoft may not, but 4NT has been around forever

[ClioCJS]

Except it was called 4DOS back in the 90s, and NDOS back in the 80s. It's a command-line that has seen over 20 yrs of development. It may be no bash, but in conjunction with cygwin, I can do a great deal of things that unix people can do on my windows machine. Which is my main reason for sticking with windows -- don't want to re-write my 1000+ scripts.

4nt can

[ClioCJS]

I have many scripts that pipe from clip: ... Like my linkifier that automatically links terms I want linked. Suck my comment into clipboard, run linkifier, paste back out with links. 4NT > CMD.

Re:4nt can

[EvanED]

Arg. Again, *not the point*. The point is that Cygwin paths look like /cygwin/c/blah/foo, and if you pass that to a Win32 program, it'll say 'wtf is /cygwin?'

Re:4nt can

[ClioCJS]

4NT treats / and \ as the same.

span nine

[epine]

they have gone almost 100% there why they stop at 95% i dont know.

In your case, the other 5% would be adding an apostrophe, a comma, and a well timed tap on the shift key, and would have cost you another 300ms (apologies for that remark if you lost both pinkies in a wheat-field bailer accident).

In their case, as we all know, "the first ninety percent of the task takes ninety percent of the time, and the last ten percent takes the other ninety percent", so they're well into exponential innings already.

And finally, a tip of the hat to Corinna Vinschen, who answered my emails about problems with services under Cygwin as far back 2000. That's a long run shepherding the near-sighted stepchild into some semblance of functional adulthood.

I know many younger Linux people whose devotion to a software download rarely exceeds ten minutes if the first spin doesn't immediately express preconceived gratification mojo.

Re:Microsoft may not, but 4NT has been around fore

[pydev]

The source for 4DOS is available; it should be fairly easy to port it to Linux.

http://www.4dos.info/sources.htm