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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-04T22:48:59+00:00

For a programmer with Linux skills and a love of the command line, what

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For a programmer with Linux skills and a love of the command line, what is better to use on Windows – Cygwin or GnuWin32?

I tried to find a good comparison or a list of differences but couldn’t find anything remotely complete. Also, I wondered whether this should be a superuser.com question, but decided against it, because I’m asking precisely for use of the tool for a programmer.

I’d like to know the common pitfalls and restrictions of each of the solutions. Interoperability with windows is an important issue, for my main development is done in MSVC…

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    It is absolutely no contest

    GnuWin32 does not include Bash

    This is a critical part of the Cygwin distribution. Switching from cmd.exe to Bash was a huge boon to my productivity. cmd.exe is cripped in comparison to Bash.

    GnuWin32 is old

    Many program go years without being updated.

    • tar 2003
    • coreutils 2005
    • zlib 2005
    • make 2006
    • wget 2008

    I would not use GnuWin32 unless I had no other choice.

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