UWIN

UWIN is a computer software package created by David Korn. It lets programs written for the operating system Unix be built and run on a different operating system, Microsoft Windows with few, if any, changes needed.

More technically, it is an X/Open library for the Windows 32-bit application programming interface (API), called Win32. Windows versions using Win32 include: NT, 2000, XP, Vista; 95, 98, Me. UWIN is similar in many ways to Cygwin.

UWIN runs best on Windows NT/2000/XP with the file system NTFS, but can run in degraded mode using FAT, and further degraded on Windows 95/98/ME. See the External link for more details.

UWIN source and binaries are available under the open source Common Public License 1.0 at AT&T AST/UWIN open source downloads.

UWIN contains:

• Libraries that emulate a Unix environment by implementing the Unix API
• Include files and development tools such as cc(1), yacc(1), lex(1), and make(1).
• ksh(1) (the Korn Shell) and over 250 utilities such as ls(1), sed(1), cp(1), stty(1), etc.

Most of the Unix API is implemented by the POSIX.DLL dynamically loaded (shared) library. Programs linked with POSIX.DLL run under the WIN32 subsystem instead of the POSIX subsystem, so programs can freely intermix Unix and WIN32 library calls. A cc(1) command is provided to compile and link programs for UWIN on Windows using traditional Unix build tools such as make(1). The cc(1) command is a front end the underlying compiler that performs the actual compilation and linking. It can be used with the Microsoft Visual C/C++ 5.X compiler, the Visual C/C++ 6.X compiler, the Visual C/C++ 7.X compiler, the Digital Mars C/C++ compiler, compiler, the Borland C/C++ compiler, and the Mingw compiler. The GNU compiler and development tools are also available for download to UWIN.

External links

• UWIN Overview