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

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.

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 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.

Initially, Cygwin was called gnuwin32 ( not to be confused with the current GnuWin32 project ).

The Cygwin / X project contributes an implementation of the X Window System that allows graphical Unix programs to display their user interfaces on the Windows desktop.

It is part of the Cygwin project, and is installed using Cygwin's standard setup system.

Apple releases most of it as an open source project called CFLite that can be used to write cross-platform applications for Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows ( via Cygwin ); a third-party open-source implementation called OpenCFLite also exists.

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

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.

In addition, there are numerous virtualization solutions that provide x86 platform virtualization to run Windows and Unix-like operating systems simultaneously on the same hardware, but without the integration of the environments that Cygwin provides.

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

** MinGW, formerly a fork of Cygwin, provides less POSIX-compliant development environment and supports compatible C-programmed applications via Msvcrt, Microsoft's old Visual C runtime library.

Cygwin also provides the GNU Compiler Collection, GNU make, and other software that provides a nearly complete Unix-like system within Windows ; MSYS also provides GNU make and other tools designed to work with the MinGW version of GCC.

Although both Cygwin and MinGW can be used to port Unix software to Windows, they have different approaches: Cygwin aims to provide a complete POSIX layer that provides emulations of several system calls and libraries that exist on Linux, Unix, and the BSD variants.

Cygwin Portable provides a similar feature.

* Cygwin 1. 7 introduced comprehensive support for POSIX locales and many character encodings, whereby the UTF-8 Unicode encoding became the default.

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

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

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.

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 ).

As with many emulation examples, not all the common KDE programs are guaranteed to work unmodified on KDE on Cygwin due to the complex interaction of all the libraries needed.

* 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.

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

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.

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.

There are two ways to run Cygwin / X:

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.

Parts of the GNU toolchain are also directly used with or ported to other platforms such as Solaris, Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows ( via Cygwin and MinGW / MSYS ) and Sony PlayStation 3.

KDE on Cygwin is the port of the Qt toolkit and the KDE desktop environment ( both of which are commonly found in Linux ) to the Windows Operating System by using Cygwin, a POSIX emulation layer.

Instructions are also available for creating the executable using Cygwin.

Common examples are the MKS Toolkit ( sh, bash, ksh, csh, tclsh, rsh with version 8. 0 and subsequent ), UnxUtils, UWIN ( AT & T Unix for Windows, also abbreviated U / WIN ), Cygwin, DJGPP, Interix, and other programmes of the same type.

There are also other distributions, like ActivePerl, the Perl programming language for various operating system, and Cygwin distributions of open-source programs for Microsoft Windows.

Irssi builds and runs on Microsoft Windows under Cygwin, and in 2006, an official Windows standalone build became available.

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 ++).

The source code is not available from Holy Cows, Inc., but they provide executables for Windows, Cygwin, and Linux.

hdparm is available in the Cygwin environment for Windows.