Mailing-List: contact cygwin-help AT cygwin DOT com; run by ezmlm List-Subscribe: List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: , Sender: cygwin-owner AT cygwin DOT com Mail-Followup-To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com Delivered-To: mailing list cygwin AT cygwin DOT com Message-ID: <409678B3.58D3BE5D@dessent.net> Date: Mon, 03 May 2004 09:52:03 -0700 From: Brian Dessent Organization: My own little world... MIME-Version: 1.0 To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com Subject: Re: how do emulators work References: <20040503162924 DOT 53852 DOT qmail AT web12401 DOT mail DOT yahoo DOT com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-IsSubscribed: yes Reply-To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com Christopher Spears wrote: > This question may seem kind of basic but how do > emulators work? Cygwin is not an emulator. It's an implementation of the POSIX standard functions and interfaces so that programs expecting to call those functions can be compiled under windows. It translates those function calls into the equivalent Windows ones, with lots of glue logic to take care of the fundamental differences between the two. You might call that "emulation" but it's not emulation in the traditional sense. It's similar to WINE, which is an implementation of the Win32 API under linux. WINE of course stands for "WINE is not an emulator". > With UNIX, you have a program called > the shell (csh, bash, etc.) that interprets commands > and calls up different utilities (ls, cp, grep, etc.). The same thing happens with Cygwin, it's no different. > However, cygwin sits inside Windows and is connected > to windows. For example, my home directory is > /home/Christopher Spears/, which would never happen in > UNIX because of the space in my name. Is cygwin > really UNIX or is it something different? It's not traditional to have a home directory with a space in it under most Unix variants but that's just tradition. You could create a home directory with a space in it with Linux if you really wanted to. Likewise, you could change your home directory in Cygwin to /home/cspears. Both systems support spaces in filenames and pathnames. Brian -- Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/