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02/06/05: Cygwin: Changing the Face of Windows

This article is a nice introduction to Cygwin for anyone who isn't already familiar with it.

Cygwin is a dynamic link library (DLL) that acts as a Linux API emulation layer. Included with the Cygwin suite are most of the common Linux command-line tools and quite a few graphical applications, giving you the look and feel of a Linux machine on top of your MS Windows box.

Sometimes, when working on a windows server, I find myself crippled by dos when writing batch files. Most notably, copy and xcopy seem to hold me back the most. Neither command will copy a directory along with all files in the directory, and subdirectories. It was when I had to schedule a simple backup of a directory full of files and subdirectories that I realized this limitation, and looked to cygwin. With it, I could write a bash script to copy the entire directory, and I could schedule the script to run in the native windows task scheduler. A very simple thing, but it sure did save me some headaches.

Definitely a handy tool for any sysadmin's kit. I'm not even 100% sure that this could not have been done with dos commands, but the fact that I am more comfortable with unix and that it was readily available made it a non-issue.

The desktop issue aside, I don't think anybody can dispute the superiority of the unix command line.



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Cygwin is an underused tool that can make the life of a sysadmin easier in many ways. My favourite use of Cygwin is as a free alternative to Exceed. I create an X11 tunnel over SSH to run remote Linux apps on a Windows desktop. With compression enabled, performance is acceptable. Here's a screenshot of Konqueror and gkrellm running on XP.

http://anand.mindvelocity.ca/blog_images/Mdk-XP.jpg

02/07/05 20:59:58

Wow, I've only used it for simple bash scripts so far. I didn't even realize it could do the things you're doing with it.

Guess I have some tinkering to do.

02/08/05 23:12:36

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