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Cygwin goes to heroic lengths to try to turn Windows into Unix; from what I've heard, it even splices a DLL into every process on the machine; if you want a les
by rwallace 14y ago
Cygwin goes to heroic lengths to try to turn Windows into Unix; from what I've heard, it even splices a DLL into every process on the machine; if you want a less intrusive solution that just gives you a Unix utilities under Windows, Gow looks good.
- andrewcooke 14y agoany chance of a reference for "splices a DLL into every process on the machine"?
- rwallace 14y agoAfraid not, I forget where I heard it. I ran a Google search just now, though, and found a few pages such as http://forum.bitdefender.com/index.php?showtopic=15070 http://forum.bitdefender.com/index.php?showtopic=15070 which suggest Cygwin is innocent of such behavior and what's really going on is Cygwin needs a fixed DLL address (only for programs linked against it) and this is not compatible with some of the more intrusive antivirus programs that do inject a DLL into every process.
- dredmorbius 14y agoCygwin processes run through a shared DLL, of which one significant consequence is that all Cygwin processes on a machine apparently share some memory/process segments, making crypto and SSH commands less secure than they might be elsewhere. That said, the heroic efforts to turn Windows into Unix, when on the rare occasion I find myself stuck in a Windows instance, are very highly appreciated. At one point in my life, I was taking advantage of this to run X on my Linux box (cleaner and a few additional features that Windows didn't offer), with tunneled SSH to Windows to run, among other things, some Windows-based applications (which retained enough commandline features to be usable in this fashion) in an environment which almost fully resembled Unix. It helped markedly for both productivity and sanity.