The app can be expected to run on all modern, released versions of Windows. They can be used from one of the provided Unix shells like bash, tcsh, or zsh. This includes configuring and building most of the available GNU or BSD software, including the packages included with the app distribution themselves. The software allows easy porting of many Unix programs without the need for extensive changes to the source code. If you're a developer you will find tools, headers, and libraries allowing to write Windows console or GUI applications that make use of significant parts of the POSIX API. The Cygwin distribution contains thousands of packages from the Open Source world including most GNU tools, many BSD tools, an X server, and a full set of X applications. The Cygwin DLL currently works with all recent, commercially released x86 32 bit and 64-bit versions of Windows.
Cygwin is a DLL (cygwin1.dll) which acts as a Linux API layer providing substantial Linux API functionality. Cygwin is a collection of tools which provide a Linux look and feel environment for Windows.
