INTRO(1)

NAME
intro - Introduction to the Cygwin Environment

DESCRIPTION
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. The intro(3) man page gives an introduction to this API. A collection of tools which provide Linux look and feel. This man page describes the user environment.

AVAILABILITY
Cygwin is developed by volunteers collaborating over the Internet. It is distributed through the website http://cygwin.com, where you can find extensive documentation, including FAQ, User's Guide, and API Reference. The Cygwin website should be considered the authoritative source of information. The source code, released under the GNU General Public License, Version 2, is also available from the website or one of the mirrors.

COMPATIBILITY
Cygwin uses the GNU versions of many of the standard UNIX command-line utilities (sed, awk, etc.), so the user environment is more similar to a Linux system than, for example, Sun Solaris.

The default login shell and /bin/sh for Cygwin is bash, the GNU "Bourne-Again Shell", but other shells such as tcsh (an improved csh) are also available and can be installed using Cygwin's setup.exe.

NOTES
To port applications you will need to install the development tools, which you can do by selecting gcc in setup.exe (dependencies are automatically handled). If you need a specific program or library, you can search for a Cygwin package containing it at: http://cygwin.com/packages/

If you are a UNIX veteran who plans to use Cygwin extensively, you will probably find it worth your while to learn to use Cygwin-specific tools that provide a UNIX-like interface to common operations. For example, cygpath converts between UNIX and Win32-style pathnames. The full documentation for these utilities is at: http://cygwin.com/cygwin-ug-net/using-utils.html The optional cygutils package also contains utilities that help with common problems, such as dos2unix and unix2dos for the CRLF issue.

DOCUMENTATION
In addition to man pages and texinfo documentation, many Cygwin packages provide system-independent documentation in the /usr/share/doc/ directory and Cygwin-specific documentation in /usr/share/doc/Cygwin/

For example, if you have both less and cron installed, the command
    less /usr/share/doc/Cygwin/cron.README would display the instructions to set up cron on your system.

REPORTING BUGS
If you find a bug in Cygwin, please read http://cygwin.com/bugs.html and follow the instructions for reporting found there. If you are able to track down the source of the bug and can provide a fix, there are instructions for contributing patches at: http://cygwin.com/contrib.html

COPYRIGHT
Cygwin is Copyright (C) 1995-2010 Red Hat, Inc.

Cygwin is Free software; for complete licensing information, refer to: http://cygwin.com/licensing.html

SEE ALSO
intro(3)