[WingedPanther]

Cygwin is an environment that runs within windows to give you access to *nix commands. The side effect of this is that when you are in Cygwin, you are NOT in Windows for all intents and purposes. While in Cygwin, you only have access to *nix commands, but do NOT have access to Windows commands. Cygwin is useful as it gives you the ability to run many programs that do not run on Windows for various reasons (such as lack of POSIX support).