Tips for Setting up Cygwin on Windows

Create these useful symbolic links:

ln -s "/cygdrive/c/Documents and Settings/username/My Documents/" ~/docs
ln -s "/cygdrive/c/Documents and Settings/username/Desktop" ~/desktop
ln -s '/cygdrive/c/Program Files/Adobe/Acrobat 6.0/Acrobat/Acrobat.exe' ~/bin

To add ~/bin to your path,

export PATH=$HOME/bin:$PATH

You can put this in your .bash_profile or .bashrc file.

Useful aliases:

alias open='cygstart'     # for Mac OS X
alias start='cygstart'    # for Windows

Re-run setup.exe to keep Cygwin up-to-date.

To find out the latest changes on your system,

ls -lt /usr/share/doc/Cygwin | head