Cygwin is a set of powerful tools to assist developers in migrating applications from UNIX/Linux to the Microsoft Windows; platform. Cygwin delivers the open source standard Red Hat GNU gcc compiler and gdb debugger on Windows. In addition, it provides for a standard UNIX/Linux development environment on Windows including APIs and command shells. The Cygwin.dll library, included with Cygwin, delivers the interesting subset of UNIX SVR4, BSD, and POSIX APIs to enable quick ports of UNIX/Linux applications to the Windows platform.
Cygwin is a Linux-like environment for Windows. It consists of two parts:
- A DLL (cygwin1.dll) which acts as a Linux API emulation layer providing substantial Linux API functionality.
- A collection of tools which provide Linux look and feel.
The Cygwin DLL currently works with all recent, commercially released x86 32 bit and 64 bit versions of Windows, with the exception of Windows CE.

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