Cygwin User's Guide

Author(s) : Corinna Vinschen, Christopher Faylor, DJ Delorie, Pierre Humblet and Geoffrey Noer
Publication date : 2001
Free license : GNU General Public License

Book description / review:

This is the user's guide for Cygwin, the popular GNU development tools and utilities for Windows NT and 9x. They function through the use of the Cygwin library which provides the UNIX system calls and environment that these programs require.

Developers coming from a UNIX background will find a set of utilities they are already comfortable using, including a working UNIX shell. The compiler tools are the standard GNU compilers most people will have previously used under UNIX, only ported to the Windows host. Programmers wishing to port UNIX software to Windows NT or 9x will find that the Cygwin library provides an easy way to port many UNIX packages, with only minimal source code changes.

Developers coming from a Windows background will find a set of tools capable of writing console or GUI executables that rely on the Microsoft Win32 API. The linker and dlltool utility may be used to write Windows Dynamically Linked Libraries (DLLs). The resource compiler "windres" is also provided with the native Windows GNUPro tools. All tools may be used from the Microsoft command line prompt, with full support for normal Windows pathnames.

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