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Does this allow you to run GCC or anything compilers on Windows?

I thought that was the main draw of Cygwin.

Check out msys/mingw. It's a challenging setup, minimal and supports gcc. Key difference with cygwin: no attempt at posix compliance.

http://www.mingw.org/

MinGW: http://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw/files/ Console2: http://sourceforge.net/projects/console/

MinGW comes with an installer that gives you GCC. Make sure you install MSYS as well (comes with bash, etc). Add the bin directories to your %PATH% when you're done. Then set Console to use bash as your default shell, and you have a pretty close setup to the command-line experience of Linux/Mac.

Indeed, that setup works pretty well.

That's one of the draws, sure. But it's also nice to be able to replicate shell scripts or clever unix file hacks with a complete set of syntax compatible utilities so that less "translation" needs to happen. If you don't need all that back-end compatibility stuff (running gcc, etc.), this can be a much quicker and easier approach.

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