Downloading GNU Development Tools

In order to install the set of Cygwin tools, go to the web site at http://sourceware.cygnus.com/cygwin/ and look near the top of the page for readme and download links:

It is an extremely good idea to follow the "readme" link first, to see:

and get the installation instructions. I wanted the full binary release so I went for the file full.exe. Back out one screen and choose the "FTP Sites" option and choose the ftp site closest to you. For the purposes of these instructions, I arbitrarily chose ftp://ftp.sunsite.utk.edu/pub/cygwin/. Go into the "latest" subdirectory and find the full.exe file, which, at the time of this writing, is 13.5 MB in size. From Internet Explorer, right click on the file and choose the Copy to Folder... option. After the download is finished, scan it for viruses (as should be done with all downloads).

Assuming it doesn't have any viruses that will melt your computer, double click the file to install it. You'll see the InstallShield(R) Wizard begin and continue until you get to the first dialog box:

Click on the Next button and continue to follow the directions presented to you by the series of subsequent dialog boxes. You will be presented with a "destination folder" in which the software will be installed. You can change it from the default if you like. Because I have a series of four 2 GB partitions of my hard disk, I chose to install it on drive e:

The rest of the installation should be straightforward.

Now see if the installation was successful by clicking the Windows Start button, then select Programs, then Cygnus Solutions, and finally, Cygwin B20. You should see a "DOS" window open with the bash shell prompt:

Following the instructions on the web pages, you'll need to type mkdir -p /tmp and then mkdir -p /bin. This (apparently) creates c:\tmp and c:\bin subdirectories and you'll need to put a copy of she.exe (found in directory e:\cygnus\cygwin-b20\H-i586-cygwin32\bin) into directory c:\bin.

Try a few Unix commands to make sure you're not getting anything unexpected in response:

The last step is to add the path to the directory containing the GNU tool executable files, such as gcc.exe, g77.exe, gdb.exe, and perl.exe. This directory is the bin directory a few levels down from the directory in which you installed the Cygwin tools. For example, on my machine, I installed the Cygnus tools in subdirectory:

e:\cygnus

and so the GNU development tools are found in subdirectory:

e:\cygnus\cygwin-b20\H-i586-cygwin32\bin\

Using Windows Explorer it looks like this:

Open your autoexec.bat file (you can use an ordinary MS-DOS  window) found in the root c:\ directory) and add the following line (the specified e:\ directory is appropriate for my machine; depending on where you installed your Cygwin, you may have to designate a different drive):

set path=%path%;e:\cygnus\cygwin~1\h-i586~1\bin

Your autoexec.bat file should look something like this:

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