CYGCHECK(1)

NAME
 - List system information, check installed packages, or query package database.

SYNOPSIS
cygcheck [-v] [-h] PROGRAM
cygcheck -c [-d] [PACKAGE]
cygcheck -s [-r] [-v] [-h]
cygcheck -k
cygcheck -f FILE [FILE]...
cygcheck -l [PACKAGE]...
cygcheck -p REGEXP
cygcheck --delete-orphaned-installation-keys
cygcheck --enable-unique-object-names Cygwin-DLL
cygcheck --disable-unique-object-names Cygwin-DLL
cygcheck --show-unique-object-names Cygwin-DLL
cygcheck -h

OPTIONS
At least one command option or a PROGRAM is required, as shown above.

PROGRAM
    list library (DLL) dependencies of PROGRAM

-c, --check-setup
    show installed version of PACKAGE and verify integrity (or for all installed packages if none specified)

-d, --dump-only
    just list packages, do not verify (with -c)

-s, --sysinfo
    produce diagnostic system information (implies -c -d)

-r, --registry
    also scan registry for Cygwin settings (with -s)

-k, --keycheck
    perform a keyboard check session (must be run from a plain console only, not from a pty/rxvt/xterm)

-f, --find-package
    find the package to which FILE belongs

-l, --list-package
    list contents of PACKAGE (or all packages if none given)

-p, --package-query
    search for REGEXP in the entire cygwin.com package repository (requires internet connectivity)

--delete-orphaned-installation-keys
    Delete installation keys of old, now unused installations from the registry. Requires the right to change the registry.

--enable-unique-object-names Cygwin-DLL

--disable-unique-object-names Cygwin-DLL

--show-unique-object-names Cygwin-DLL
    Enable, disable, or show the setting of the \"unique object names\" setting in the Cygwin DLL given as argument to this option. The DLL path must be given as valid Windows(!) path. See the users guide for more information. If you don't know what this means, don't change it.

-v, --verbose
    produce more verbose output

-h, --help
    annotate output with explanatory comments when given with another command, otherwise print this help

-V, --version
    print the version of cygcheck and exit

Note: -c, -f, and -l only report on packages that are currently installed. To

search all official Cygwin packages use -p instead.
    The -p REGEXP matches

    package names, descriptions, and names of files/paths within all packages.

DESCRIPTION
 The cygcheck program is a diagnostic utility for dealing with Cygwin programs. If you are familiar with dpkg or rpm, cygcheck is similar in many ways. (The major difference is that setup.exe handles installing and uninstalling packages; see internet-setup /xref for more information.)

 The -c option checks the version and status of installed Cygwin packages. If you specify one or more package names, cygcheck will limit its output to those packages, or with no arguments it lists all packages. A package will be marked Incomplete if files originally installed are no longer present. The best thing to do in that situation is reinstall the package with setup.exe. To see which files are missing, use the -v option. If you do not need to know the status of each package and want cygcheck to run faster, add the -d option and cygcheck will only output the name and version for each package.

 If you list one or more programs on the command line, cygcheck will diagnose the runtime environment of that program or programs, providing the names of DLL files on which the program depends. If you specify the -s option, cygcheck will give general system information. If you list one or more programs on the command line and specify -s, cygcheck will report on both.

 The -f option helps you to track down which package a file came from, and -l lists all files in a package. For example, to find out about /usr/bin/less and its package: cygcheck usage

$ cygcheck -f /usr/bin/less
less-381-1
$ cygcheck -l less
/usr/bin/less.exe
/usr/bin/lessecho.exe
/usr/bin/lesskey.exe
/usr/man/man1/less.1
/usr/man/man1/lesskey.1

The -h option prints additional helpful messages in the report, at the beginning of each section. It also adds table column headings. While this is useful information, it also adds some to the size of the report, so if you want a compact report or if you know what everything is already, just leave this out.

The -v option causes the output to be more verbose. What this means is that additional information will be reported which is usually not interesting, such as the internal version numbers of DLLs, additional information about recursive DLL usage, and if a file in one directory in the PATH also occurs in other directories on the PATH.

The -r option causes cygcheck to search your registry for information that is relevent to Cygwin programs. These registry entries are the ones that have "Cygwin" in the name. If you are paranoid about privacy, you may remove information from this report, but please keep in mind that doing so makes it harder to diagnose your problems.

In contrast to the other options that search the packages that are installed on your local system, the -p option can be used to search the entire official Cygwin package repository. It takes as argument a Perl-compatible regular expression which is used to match package names, package descriptions, and path/filenames of the contents of packages. This feature requires an active internet connection, since it must query the cygwin.com web site. In fact, it is equalivant to the search that is available on the package listing

For example, perhaps you are getting an error because you are missing a certain DLL and you want to know which package includes that file:

$ cygcheck -p 'cygintl-2\.dll'
Found 1 matches for 'cygintl-2\.dll'.
libintl2-0.12.1-3 GNU Internationalization runtime library
$ cygcheck -p 'libexpat.*\.a'
Found 2 matches for 'libexpat.*\.a'.
expat-1.95.7-1 XML parser library written in C
expat-1.95.8-1 XML parser library written in C
$ cygcheck -p '/ls\.exe'
Found 2 matches for '/ls\.exe'.
coreutils-5.2.1-5 GNU core utilities (includes fileutils, sh-utils and textutils)
coreutils-5.3.0-6 GNU core utilities (includes fileutils, sh-utils and textutils)

Note that this option takes a regular expression, not a glob or wildcard. This means that you need to use .* if you want something similar to the wildcard * commonly used in filename globbing. Similarly, to match the period character you should use \. since the . character in a regexp is a metacharacter that will match any character. Also be aware that the characters such as \ and * are shell metacharacters, so they must be either escaped or quoted, as in the example above.

The third example above illustrates that if you want to match a whole filename, you should include the / path seperator. In the given example this ensures that filenames that happen to end in ls.exe such as ncftpls.exe are not shown. Note that this use does not mean "look for packages with ls in the root directory," since the / can match anywhere in the path. It's just there to anchor the match so that it matches a full filename.

By default the matching is case-sensitive. To get a case insensitive match, begin your regexp with (?i) which is a PCRE-specific feature. For complete documentation on Perl-compatible regular expression syntax and options, read the perlre manpage, or one of many websites such as perldoc.com that document the Perl language.

The cygcheck program should be used to send information about your system for troubleshooting when requested. When asked to run this command save the output so that you can email it, for example:

$ cygcheck -s -v -r -h > cygcheck_output.txt

 Each Cygwin DLL stores its path and installation key in the registry. This allows troubleshooting of problems which could be a result of having multiple concurrent Cygwin installations. However, if you're experimenting a lot with different Cygwin installation paths, your registry could accumulate a lot of old Cygwin installation entries for which the installation doesn't exist anymore. To get rid of these orphaned registry entries, use the cygcheck --delete-orphaned-installation-keys command.

 Each Cygwin DLL generates a key value from its installation path. This value is not only stored in the registry, it's also used to generate global object names used for interprocess communication. This keeps different Cygwin installations separate. Processes running under a Cygwin DLL installed in C:\cygwin don't see processes running under a Cygwin DLL installed in C:\Program Files\cygwin. This allows running multiple versions of Cygwin DLLs without these versions to interfere with each other, or to run small third-party installations for a specific purpose independently from a Cygwin net distribution.

 For debugging purposes it could be desired that the various Cygwin DLLs use the same key, independently from their installation paths. If the DLLs have different versions, trying to run processes under these DLLs concurrently will result in error messages like this one:

*** shared version mismatch detected - 0x8A88009C/0x75BE0074.
This problem is probably due to using incompatible versions of the cygwin DLL.
and delete all but the most recent version. The most recent version *should*
reside in x:\\cygwin\\bin, where 'x' is the drive on which you have
installed the cygwin distribution. Rebooting is also suggested if you
are unable to find another cygwin DLL.

 To disable the usage of a unique key value of a certain Cygwin DLL, use the cygcheck --disable-unique-object-names Cygwin-DLL command. Cygwin-DLL is the Windows path (*not* a Cygwin POSIX path) to the DLL for which you want to disable this feature. Note that you have to stop all Cygwin processes running under this DLL, before you're allowed to change this setting. For instance, run cygcheck from a DOS command line for this purpose.

To re-enable the usage of a unique key, use the cygcheck --enable-unique-object-names Cygwin-DLL command. This option has the same characteristics as the --disable-unique-object-names option

Finally, you can use cygcheck --show-unique-object-names Cygwin-DLL to find out if the given Cygwin DLL use unique object names or not. In contrast to the --disable-... and --enable-... options, the --show-unique-object-names option also works for Cygwin DLLs which are currently in use.

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
The full documentation to the Cygwin API is maintained on the web at: http://cygwin.com/cygwin-api/cygwin-api.html The website is updated more frequently than the man pages and should be considered the authoritative source of information.