Running Git through Cygwin from Windows

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I confirm that git and msysgit can coexist on the same computer, as mentioned in “Which GIT version to use cygwin or msysGit or both?”.

  1. Git for Windows (msysgit) will run in its own shell (dos with git-cmd.bat or bash with Git Bash.vbs)
    Update 2016: msysgit is obsolete, and the new Git for Windows now uses msys2

  2. Git on Cygwin, after installing its package, will run in its own cygwin bash shell.

git package selection on Cygwin

  1. Finally, since Q3 2016 and the “Windows 10 anniversary update”, you can use Git in a bash (an actual Ubuntu(!) bash).

http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/bash-1.jpg

In there, you can do a sudo apt-get install git-core and start using git on project-sources present either on the WSL container’s “native” file-system (see below), or in the hosting Windows’s file-system through the /mnt/c/..., /mnt/d/... directory hierarchies.

Specifically for the Bash on Windows or WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux):

  • It is a light-weight virtualization container (technically, a “Drawbridge” pico-process,
  • hosting an unmodified “headless” Linux distribution (i.e. Ubuntu minus the kernel),
  • which can execute terminal-based commands (and even X-server client apps if an X-server for Windows is installed),
  • with emulated access to the Windows file-system (meaning that, apart from reduced performance, encodings for files in DrvFs emulated file-system may not behave the same as files on the native VolFs file-system).
  • Unfortunately, it cannot invoke back into Windows executables, or
  • interact with any native drivers (i.e. so no Graphic card, no USB drives yet).

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