Subsections

Path names

Cygwin is a Linux-like environment for Windows. Like on Linux platforms, path names within Cygwin conform to the Posix standard. This has the following consequences:

Confused? Here is a table with some directory names written in the Windows and Cygwin way:

Windows name Cygwin name
C:\cygwin /
C:\cygwin\home /home
C:\cygwin\usr\local /usr/local
C: /cygdrive/c
D:\temp /cygdrive/d/temp

When you start up the bash shell, its working directory will be /home/yourname, where yourname is your login name on Windows. The first time you log in, this directory will be empty. For Windows programs, the path to this directory will be C:\cygwin\home\yourname

You can either use this directory as a working directory when you are programming, or you can choose a directory of your own, and make a link to that directory in your Cygwin home directory. How this can be done is explained here.

Moving trough directories

cd DIR

The basic command to change your working directory is cd. The argument to that command is the Cygwin path name of the directory you want to go to.

cd /usr/local

will change your working directory to /usr/local

You can also use relative path names (i.e. relative to your current working directory). Suppose you are in /usr/local and want to go to /usr/bin. You can either type

cd /usr/bin

but you can also type

cd ../bin

where the .. means: the directory below my current working directory.

Spaces within file names will have to be escaped with a backslash (\)

cd /cygdrive/c/Program\ Files

  means: home directory of the current user.

cd ~

will change the working directory to your home directory.


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