Cygwin command line installation

Have you ever wished you could install Cygwin programs via the command line? Well you can. Just use this shellscript that Stephen Jungels wrote. Just download it into your cygwin /usr/bin directory and modify if necessary. View apt-cyg

  • First ssh to the cygwin box.
  • Next download the needed packages for apt-cyg
  • ./setup.exe -q -P  wget,tar,qawk,bzip2,subversion,vim
  • Finally, download the apt-cyg script from Stephen’s repository.
  • $ svn –force export http://apt-cyg.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ /bin/
  • $ chmod +x /bin/apt-cyg

Now that you have all the tools, just run the “apt-cyg” command to find and install anything from the cygwin repositories.

apt-cyg install <package names>” to install packages
apt-cyg remove <package names>” to remove packages
apt-cyg update” to update setup.ini
apt-cyg show” to show installed packages
apt-cyg find <pattern(s)>” to find packages matching patterns
apt-cyg describe <pattern(s)>” to describe packages matching patterns
apt-cyg packageof <commands or files>” to locate parent packages

 

1 comment

  1. I am trying to install Cygwin on a windows machine via command line. The Cygwin repo is sitting on a Linux server and is accessible via samba share. I am not sure, but I think this string will do the trick:

    setup.exe -q -n -N -d -R c:\cygwin -s \\linux-smb-server\cygwin -l c:\localPackageDir

    I got this far with some Google-Fu, but I only want to install specific packages. I got an existing package list from another PC by running a cygcheck -c. I am a little fuzzy on how to specify the specific packages I want in the above string, and not sure whether or not the string its-self will work.

    Please advise,

    Ron

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