Cygwin

To facilitate interoperability with applications running on UNIX and Linux systems, the Windows version of the software includes a subset of the Red Hat cygwin UNIX environment. The following description of cygwin comes from the official Cygwin web site at http://www.cygwin.com.

Cygwin is a UNIX environment, developed by Red Hat, for Windows. It consists of two parts: - A DLL (cygwin1.dll) which acts as a UNIX emulation layer providing substantial UNIX API functionality. - A collection of tools, ported from UNIX, which provide UNIX/Linux look and feel. The Cygwin DLL works with all non-beta, non “release candidate”, ix86 versions of Windows since Windows 95, with the exception of Windows CE.