# Using Cygwin effectively with Windows

Cygwin is not a full operating system, and so must rely on Windows for accomplishing some tasks. For example, Cygwin provides a POSIX view of the Windows filesystem, but does not provide filesystem drivers of its own. Therefore part of using Cygwin effectively is learning to use Windows effectively. Many Windows utilities provide a good way to interact with Cygwin's predominately command-line environment. For example, `ipconfig.exe` provides information about network configuration, and `net.exe` views and configures network file and printer resources. Most of these tools support the `/?` switch to display usage information.

Unfortunately, no standard set of tools included with all versions of Windows exists. Generally, the younger the Windows version, the more complete are the on-board tools. Microsoft also provides free downloads for Windows XP (the Windows Support Tools). Additionally, many independent sites such as download.com, simtel.net, and Microsoft's own Sysinternals provide quite useful command-line utilities, as far as they are not already provided by Cygwin. A few Windows tools, such as `find.exe`, `link.exe` and `sort.exe`, may conflict with the Cygwin versions make sure that you use the full path (`/usr/bin/find`) or that your Cygwin `bin` directory comes first in your `PATH`.

## Pathnames

Windows programs do not understand POSIX pathnames, so any arguments that reference the filesystem must be in Windows (or DOS) format or translated. Cygwin provides the `cygpath` utility for converting between Windows and POSIX paths. A complete description of its options and examples of its usage are in cygpath, including a shell script for starting Windows Explorer in any directory. The same format works for most Windows programs, for example

    notepad.exe "$(cygpath -aw "Desktop/Phone Numbers.txt")"

A few programs require a Windows-style, semicolon-delimited path list, which `cygpath` can translate from a POSIX path with the `-p` option. For example, a Java compilation from `bash` might look like this:

    javac -cp "$(cygpath -pw "$CLASSPATH")" hello.java

Since using quoting and subshells is somewhat awkward, it is often preferable to use `cygpath` in shell scripts.

## Cygwin and Windows Networking

Many popular Cygwin packages, such as `ncftp`, `lynx`, and `wget`, require a network connection. Since Cygwin relies on Windows for connectivity, if one of these tools is not working as expected you may need to troubleshoot using Windows tools. The first test is to see if you can reach the URL's host with `ping.exe`, one of the few utilities included with every Windows version since Windows 95. If you chose to install the `inetutils` package, you may have both Windows and Cygwin versions of utilities such as `ftp` and `telnet`. If you are having problems using one of these programs, see if the alternate one works as expected.

There are a variety of other programs available for specific situations. If your system does not have an always-on network connection, you may be interested in `rasdial.exe` for automating dialup connections. Users who frequently change their network configuration can script these changes with `netsh.exe`. For proxy users, the open source NTLM Authorization Proxy Server or the no-charge Hummingbird SOCKS Proxy may allow you to use Cygwin network programs in your environment.

## The cygutils package

The optional `cygutils` package contains miscellaneous tools that are small enough to not require their own package. It is not included in a default Cygwin install; select it from the Utils category in `setup.exe`. Several of the `cygutils` tools are useful for interacting with Windows.

One of the hassles of Unix-Windows interoperability is the different line endings on text files. As mentioned in using-textbinary, Unix tools such as `tr` can convert between CRLF and LF endings, but `cygutils` provides several dedicated programs: `conv`, `d2u`, `dos2unix`, `u2d`, and `unix2dos`. Use the `--help` switch for usage information.

## Creating shortcuts with cygutils

Another problem area is between Unix-style links, which link one file to another, and Microsoft .lnk files, which provide a shortcut to a file. They seem similar at first glance but, in reality, are fairly different. By default, Cygwin does not create symlinks as .lnk files, but there's an option to do that, see using-cygwinenv. These symlink .lnk files are compatible with Windows-created .lnk files, but they are still different. They do not include much of the information that is available in a standard Microsoft shortcut, such as the working directory, an icon, etc. The `cygutils` package includes a `mkshortcut` utility for creating standard native Microsoft .lnk files.

But here's the problem. If Cygwin handled these native shortcuts like any other symlink, you could not archive Microsoft .lnk files into `tar` archives and keep all the information in them. After unpacking, these shortcuts would have lost all the extra information and would be no different than standard Cygwin symlinks. Therefore these two types of links are treated differently. Unfortunately, this means that the usual Unix way of creating and using symlinks does not work with native Windows shortcuts.

## Printing with cygutils

There are several options for printing from Cygwin, including the `lpr` found in `cygutils` (not to be confused with the native Windows `lpr.exe`). The easiest way to use `cygutils`' `lpr` is to specify a default device name in the `PRINTER` environment variable. You may also specify a device on the command line with the `-d` or `-P` options, which will override the environment variable setting.

A device name may be a UNC path (`\\server_name\printer_name`), a reserved DOS device name (`prn`, `lpt1`), or a local port name that is mapped to a printer share. Note that forward slashes may be used in a UNC path (`//server_name/printer_name`), which is helpful when using `lpr` from a shell that uses the backslash as an escape character.

`lpr` sends raw data to the printer; no formatting is done. Many, but not all, printers accept plain text as input. If your printer supports PostScript, packages such as `a2ps` and `enscript` can prepare text files for printing. The `ghostscript` package also provides some translation from PostScript to various native printer languages. Additionally, a native Windows application for printing PostScript, `gsprint`, is available from the Ghostscript website.