new to cygwin: where do i get...?

[Brian Dessent]

geekleaf wrote:

> I am new to this list and to cygwin so please excuse some basic questions...
> I installed cygwin from setup.exe from the main cygwin.org site but noticed
> that many commands are missing -- not surprising -- what is the best way to
> populate my various bins? where do i get the commands? I could poke around

Everything is done through setup.exe.  The base install only includes a
minimal number of packages.  Run setup.exe again and select whatever
packages you want.  Visit <http://cygwin.com/packages/> for more info.

> /home/myLoginName -- which is fine, but that directory isn't there so I had
> to create it.  PATH als is set up to look in cygdriver/... or whatever
> (can't remember now) so I am wondering if I have neglected to install

Pathnames that are not mounted get translated into /cygdrive.  In other
words, c:\cygwin\bin is mounted as /bin so it will show up as /bin in
the path.  But C:\foo\bar isn't mounted explicitly so its POSIX pathname
will be /cygdrive/c/foo/bar.  /cygdrive is just a convenience to let a
drive letter be turned into a POSIX/UNIX style path.

Also, if your Windows login name has a space in it that will cause some
problems.  THere is an entry in the FAQ about it.

> Also when I exit bash it says "logout" which implies that it is interpreting
> that shell as a login shell which in turn implies that I should be able to
> use a .login or .profile as the case may be -- how do I provide some kind of
> initialization when I start cygwin?
> Thanks in advance for any pointers!

Yes, you can do all that just as you would do in unix.  You can edit
/etc/profile (for system wide changes), add a file to /etc/profile.d
(whose contents is sourced from /etc/profile) or add per-user settings
to ~/.profile, ~/.bash_profile, ~/.bashrc, and so on.  Run "man bash"
and search for the section titled "INVOCATION" for details on all the
startup files that bash looks for.  Other shells will have slightly
different files that they look for at startup, but bash is the default
shell that Cygwin uses.

Brian

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