Cygwin 1. 5 represented them as Windows Explorer shortcuts, but this has been changed for reasons of performance and POSIX correctness.

In 1999, Cygnus offered Cygwin 1. 0 as a commercial product of interest in its own right although subsequent versions have not been released, instead relying on continued open source releases.

In addition, a component of MinGW known as MSYS ( Minimal SYStem ), which was derived from Cygwin version 1. 3. 3, provides a minimal Unix-like shell environment including bash and a selection of POSIX tools sufficient to enable autoconf scripts to run.

MinGW forked from version 1. 3. 3 of Cygwin.

It has been ported to Microsoft Windows and distributed with Cygwin and MinGW, to DOS by the DJGPP project, to Novell NetWare and to Android via various terminal emulation applications.

Cygwin ( ) is a Unix-like environment and command-line interface for Microsoft Windows.

Cygwin provides native integration of Windows-based applications, data, and other system resources with applications, software tools, and data of the Unix-like environment.

Thus it is possible to launch Windows applications from the Cygwin environment, as well as to use Cygwin tools and applications within the Windows operating context.

Cygwin consists of two parts: a dynamic-link library ( DLL ) as an API compatibility layer providing a substantial part of the POSIX API functionality, and an extensive collection of software tools and applications that provide a Unix-like look and feel.

Cygwin was originally developed by Cygnus Solutions, which was later acquired by Red Hat.

Cygwin consists of a library that implements the POSIX system call API in terms of Win32 system calls, a GNU development toolchain ( including GCC and GDB ) to allow software development, and a large number of application programs equivalent to those on Unix systems.

Many Unix, GNU, BSD and Linux programs and packages have been ported to Cygwin, including the X Window System, K Desktop Environment 3, GNOME, Apache, and TeX.

Cygwin permits installing inetd, syslogd, sshd, Apache, and other daemons as standard Windows services, allowing Microsoft Windows systems to emulate Unix and Linux servers.

Cygwin programs are installed by running Cygwin's " setup " program, which downloads the necessary program and feature package files from repositories on the Internet.

Windows paths can also be used directly from Cygwin programs, but many programs do not support them correctly, hence this is discouraged.

Cygwin also recognises NTFS junction points and symbolic links and treats them as POSIX symbolic links, but it does not create them as their semantics are not fully POSIX-compliant.

* The Cygwin DLL contains a console driver that emulates a Unix-style terminal within the Windows console.

Cygwin's default user interface is the bash shell running in the Cygwin console.

Cygwin ships with a number of terminal emulators that are based on them, including mintty, rxvt (- unicode ), and xterm.

These are more compliant with Unix terminal standards and user interface conventions than the Cygwin console, but are less suited for running Windows console programs.

* Apart from always being linked against the Cygwin DLL, Cygwin executables are normal Windows executables.

This means that Cygwin programs have full access to the Windows API and other Windows libraries, which allows gradual porting of programs from one platform to the other.

The version of gcc that comes with Cygwin has various extensions for creating Windows DLLs, specifying whether a program is a windowing or console mode program, adding resources, etc.

Cygwin began in 1995 as a project of Steve Chamberlain, a Cygnus engineer who observed that Windows NT and 95 used COFF as their object file format, and that GNU already included support for x86 and COFF, and the C library newlib.

Microsoft Windows is not shipped with support for X, but many third-party implementations exist, as free and open source software such as Cygwin / X, Xming ( free up to 6. 9. 0. 31 ) and WeirdX ; freeware such as Mocha X Server ; and proprietary products such as Xmanager, Exceed, eXcursion ( Hewlett-Packard ), MKS X / Server, Reflection X, X-Win32 and Xming ( current versions ).

* Cygnus Solutions, a company that provided commercial support for free software and the original developer of Cygwin

* fetchmail ( GPL ) works with many protocols, including ODMR ; win32 ports require Cygwin: looks like that doesn't support TLS data exchange ( using STARTTLS )

Clip compiler is a multi-platform ( Linux and Windows ( Cygwin )) Clipper programming language compiler with many additional features and libraries ( for gtk, fivewin, netto, MySQL, ODBC, cti, tcp, gzip, Interbase, Oracle, Postgres ), which is quite fast, has support for Hyper-Six and FoxPro RDD's, and can compile existing Clipper source code with very minor changes.

Support for compiling programs that do not require the POSIX compatibility layer provided by the Cygwin DLL used to be included in the default gcc, but is now provided by cross compilers contributed by the MinGW-w64 project.

Cygwin is used heavily for porting many popular pieces of software to the Windows platform.

Cygwin ships with a fairly small number of X applications, for example:

In addition to the low-level Xlib library for developing X applications, Cygwin also ships with various higher-level and cross-platform GUI frameworks, including Gtk + and Qt.

* Cygwin / X ( X11 for Cygwin )

Originally developed on IRIX, Freeciv has been ported to many different operating systems: it is distributed with many Linux distributions, offers installers for Microsoft Windows, and has been known to run on Mac OS X, Solaris, Ultrix, QNX, OS / 2, Cygwin, AmigaOS, RISC OS, Maemo, ZETA, SkyOS and various BSDs.

The official implementation, the Melbourne Mercury Compiler, is available for most Unix platforms, including Mac OS X, as well as for Microsoft Windows ( in Windows, it requires one of the Cygwin or MinGW toolsets, and can be compiled either with GCC or Microsoft Visual C ++).

* Open source Motorola Exorciser and SWTPC emulator for Linux / Cygwin

* Cygwin provides a largely POSIX-compliant development and run-time environment for Microsoft Windows.

Ports of grep ( within Cygwin and GnuWin32, for example ) also run under Microsoft Windows.

One example of the current use of UUCP is in the retail industry by Epicor CRS Retail Systems for transferring batch files between corporate and store systems via TCP and dial-up on SCO OpenServer, Red Hat Linux, and Microsoft Windows ( with Cygwin ).

* Exorsim Open source 6800 Flex ( and Motorola Exorciser ) Emulator for Linux / Cygwin

* An HP48 emlator-decompiler for Unix / Linux or Windows ( using Cygwin ) by Paul Courbis

One use for Cygwin / X is to provide a graphical interface for applications running on the same computer with Cygwin / X which are designed for the X Window System.