Cygwin 简介

Cygwin
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 supported on Windows 2000, 2003 Server, XP, Vista, 2008 Server.

What Can Cygwin Do?
With Cygwin, administrators can login remotely to any PC, fix problems within a Posix/Linux/UNIX shell on any Windows machine, and run shell command scripts. Sophisticated shell command scripts can be created with standard shells, such as sed or awk. Standard Windows command line tools can even be intermixed within the UNIX/Linux shell script environment to administer the Windows system. Over the years, UNIX/Linux system administrators have developed a large toolbox set of management scripts for their UNIX/Linux machines. Cygwin provides the ability to continue using these scripts on Windows machines.

Why Use Cygwin?
One of the largest problems developers face today is supporting their applications on disparate platforms. Windows workstations continue to be added to an environment already populated by Linux and other UNIX-based Operating Systems. Using Cygwin, developers can manage heterogeneous environments in a consistent, efficient way. Cygwin provides a standard UNIX/Linux shell environment, including many of its most useful commands to the Windows platform, so IT managers can effectively deploy trained staff and leverage existing investments in UNIX/Linux source code and shell scripts.

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.

Note that the official support for Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows Me will be discontinued with the next major version (1.7) of Cygwin, which is in beta testing right now. Note that Windows 7 and later will only be supported starting with the 1.7 version of Cygwin.

What Isn't Cygwin?
Cygwin is not a way to run native linux apps on Windows. You have to rebuild your application from source if you want it to run on Windows.
Cygwin is not a way to magically make native Windows apps aware of UNIX ® functionality, like signals, ptys, etc. Again, you need to build your apps from source if you want to take advantage of Cygwin functionality.