Assist developers in migrating applications from UNIX/Linux to the MS Windows.
Editor: Cygwin is a set of powerful tools to assist developers in migrating applications from UNIX/Linux to the Microsoft Windows; platform. Cygwin delivers the open source standard Red Hat GNU gcc compiler and gdb debugger on Windows. In addition, it provides for a standard UNIX/Linux development environment on Windows including APIs and command shells. The Cygwin.dll library, included with Cygwin, delivers the interesting subset of UNIX SVR4, BSD, and POSIX APIs to enable quick ports of UNIX/Linux applications to the Windows platform.
Cygwin is a Linux-like environment for Windows. It consists of two parts:
- A DLL (cygwin1.dll) which acts as a Linux API emulation Layer providing substantial Linux API functionality.
- A collection of tools which provide Linux look and feel.
The Cygwin DLL currently works with all recent, commercially released x86 32 bit and 64 bit versions of Windows, with the exception of Windows CE.
new
If a filename cannot be represented in the current character set,
the character will be converted to a sequence Ctrl-N + UTF-8 representation
of the character. This allows to access all files, even those not
having a valid representation of their filename in the current character
set (codepage). To always have a valid String, use the UTF-8 charset
by setting the environment variable $LANG, $LC_ALL, or $LC_CTYPE to a
valid POSIX value, for instance in Cygwin.bat like this:

set LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8

- PATH_MAX is now 4096. Internally, path names can be as long as the
underlying OS can handle (32K).

- struct dirent now supports d_type, filled out with DT_REG or DT_DIR.
All other file types return as DT_UNKNOWN for performance reasons.

- The CYGWIN environment variable options ntsec and smbntsec have
been replaced by the per-mount option acl/noacl.

- The CYGWIN environment variable option ntea has been removed without
substitute you can free download Cygwin 1.7.7-1 now.