Start here

Don't leave home without it:

Ports of popular GNU tools. Direct links:

The FAQ
Development kit. Get this.

Unpack by double-clicking on the executable. When it asks where you want to install it, bear in mind that it will create a subdirectory called cygwin-b20 underneath wherever you specify. You can try to follow the instructions, or you can do this:

Open the System Properties control panel and:
- Add c:\tools\cygwin-b20\H-i586-cygwin32\bin to PATH
- Set HOME to c:\users\johnr
From the start menu, find the Cygnus menu and open Cygwin B20, which is the bash shell. Run:
```
  mount c:/temp /tmp
```
to create the /tmp mount point. (Ignore the warning.) You may need to mount other stuff as well. Note that /bin is already mounted to c:\tools\cygwin-b20\H-i586-cygwin32\bin and / is already mounted to C:.
I also recommend creating a directory /tools/bin and adding c:\tools\bin to you path. Then you can use this directory for any new command-line.

It used to be possible to do the following, but as o: January 1999, it doesn't work: To mount the Unix file system so it is visible from bash, do:

mount \\\\machinename\\username /username

For example, I entered

mount \\\\kahn\\johnr /kahn

Now you can do, for example, cd /kahn. This setting is stored in the Windows registry, so you never have to do it again.