Cygwin - commands

When you use the Cygwin shortcut previously described, an MSDOS window will pop-up - hopefully with BASH-2.05$. You are now in Bash - the default command-line shell for Cygwin. We suggest you experiment with Bash as you're going to spend a lot of time here!

Some useful commands are:

• help
  help [pattern]
  Displays helpful information about builtin commands. If pattern is specified, help gives detailed help on all commands matching pattern, otherwise a list of the builtins is displayed.

• ls : directory listing
  This will list all the files/sub-directories in the current directory.

  If you having problems distinguishing filenames from directories in the output, try using

  ls --color

  This will list as above but displays different items in varying colours

• pwd
  Prints the name of the current working directory

• cd : change directory
  Remembering that "../" takes you up one directory.

  If you are moving to a directory whose name includes a space, you may have to quote the directory name - E.g.

  cd '../lspace work'

  To change to another drive, try using

  cd E:/Windows

  If this does not work successfully, try

  cd /cygdrive/e/Windows

• make : changes .h4 files to .html pages
  Change to the sub-directory in which you are working first - eg.

  cd d/lspace/fandom/afp/filks

  This can save a great deal of time rather than running make from your working root directory.

• find : similar to Windows Find utility

  For example, to search your current directory tree for unexpanded macro calls:

  find . -name '*.html' | xargs egrep '_[A-Z][A-Z]+'

  To search for unescaped ampersands (& as opposed to &)

  find . -name '*.h4' | xargs fgrep '& '

  (At present, although find works perfectly under Cygwin, there is a problem with the | character - namely that 'SHIFT-\' does not function. We are looking for a workaround.)

• exit : exits cygwin
  

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