Introducing Cygwin

Previously, I wrote that Cygwin provides an alternative to the windows shell, makes Unix-lovers feel more at home with Windows and vice-versa. That is only the partial truth.
The truth is Cygwin emulates Linux on Windows. If you replace the Windows background with any of the open-source wallpapers, hide the Windows task bar, and only run the cygwin terminal, you can almost cheat yourself that you’re running a Unix-based OS. This is thanks to a DLL named cygwin1.dll which is the actual Linux API emulation layer.
Cygwin is different from other utility packages providing Unix-like functionality like, say, UnxUtils because of the …read more