I love the cygwin shell. It makes windows marginally useful as a sysadmin platform. It's one of the first tools I add to a base windows install.
I go to Cygwin setup.exe, down load it and run it.
I download first without installing.
Create a local package directory (I use 20120518_cygwin as a directory for example). Slect “Direct Connection”. Select the first line for a download server, and once the packages list has downloaded you will have “Default” selections throughout.
I select several non-default packages… Search for each package, and click once on “Default”, which changes to “Install”.
- ssh
- gnupg
- svn
- whois
- wget
- rsync
- X11 (all of this module)
- python
- perl
- vim
- curl
- ssl
- ruby
Once that download completes successfully, you can run setup.exe again and install from that local directory, selecting "All" by clicking on that top “Default” and making it “Install” – this will install all local packages you previously downloaded. That local install directory can be zipped up with setup.exe and become the install for cygwin – it gradually slips out of date, but is fast and easy to use.
The download and install are slow. But once complete you have a full unix bash shell that understands find, ls, rm, cp, mv, ping, ssh, etc.
—doug