How To Install and Use Cygwin With Terminal and SSH Examples?

Cygwin is a free software to provide Linux and Unix environment, tools, and libraries in Windows operating systems. Cygwin is also called an emulator because it translates Linux system calls into Windows type systems calls. Cygwin generally used to run Linux tools like ssh, SCP, bash, X11, GCC in the Windows environment. Cygwin support following operating systems

• Windows XP
• Windows Vista
• Windows 7
• Windows 8
• Windows 10
• Windows Server 2003
• Windows Server 2008
• Windows Server 2012
• Windows Server 2016

Installation

Download Installation Files

We will download installation files from Cygwin site. There is two type of installation files

32 bit – x86

32 bit installation file can be downloaded from following link.

https://www.cygwin.com/setup-x86.exe

64 bit – x86_64

64 bit installation file can be downloaded from following link.

https://www.cygwin.com/setup-x86.exe

Start Setup Of Cygwin

We will start installation by clicking the downloaded files. To install we need Administrator privileges.

In this screen we see information about installation like version, architecture.

Installation Method

We have three option to get installation files.

• Install from Internet will get files from repositories and install
• Download Without Installing will only get files and do not install
• Install from Local Directory will get files from local disk and start installation.

Choose Installation Directory

We need to choose the installation directory. Default path is good but we can change to the Program Files too. There is also an option to chose which users can use Cygwin.

Download Directory

We will chose where to save the downloaded Cygwin packages.

Select Internet Connection Type

We will select the connection type. For regular network connections Direct Connection is enough but if we use proxy we should provide related parameters with the other options.

Choose Download Site

We will choose the site for downloading packages. Prefer physically near sites for faster download.

Update Package Repository Information

Then the package and repository information will be updated from previously selected site.

Select Packages

Now we are here to select applications, tools, libraries, groups to install.

We can search package name with the Search box or select from the list directly. Packages are grouped according to their functionalities like Admin , Database , GNOME etc. We can select the whole group or single package from the group.

Install SSH

For simplicity we have searched ssh to installation. After search operation the dependencies are resolved and we will click Next

Installation

We install ssh by downloading dependencies packages. Also this is the first installation so the Cygwin will install base packages those are used by a lot of other applications, tools.

Add New Package or Tool

We will install ssh from Net group. We search and select package named openssh.

Run Ssh With Cygwin

After the ssh installation is completed we can access the ssh from the Cygwin command line. Cygwin shortcut is created on the desktop. Open it by clicking. And type ssh like below.

Run Bash With Cygwin

The default shell is bash. We can check the current shell with the env command which will list environment-related variables. We will search for SHELL line and variable like below.

$ env | grep SHELL