MSYS, a contraction of "Minimal SYStem", is a POSIX-like command line interpreter system, (CLI), offered as an alternative to the Windows Command Prompt, (a.k.a. cmd.exe). Conceived to facilitate the execution of the POSIX style build scripts commonly provided by Open Source projects, and to interpret the Makefiles which they generate, its CLI interprets the Bourne Shell command language, in order to execute the commands commonly invoked by such scripts.
Full description
MSYS is a lightweight shell environment that comes in two flavors: it can be loaded as a MSYS shell to compile projects that will run under MSYS; or it can be loaded as a MinGW shell to compile native Window programs.
The GNU build process involves certain tools, such as autoconf, which are hard to port to native Windows. But these tools are needed to build native Windows applications from sources packaged in a form to enable the GNU build process. MSYS allows running these tools. Applications that can run inside MSYS but not in Windows cmd.exe belong to a category of applications referred to as MSYS Applications.
The shell environment provides a hand picked set of tools to allow a typical configuration script with Bourne Shell syntax to execute. This allows most of the GNU packages to create a Makefile just from executing the typical configure script; this may then be processed by the GNU make utility, provided with MSYS, to build the package using the native MinGW version of GCC.
The POSIX layer used by MSYS is a fork of the 1.3.3 version of
Cygwin. Cygwin is a full POSIX layer and UNIX-like environment for Win32 providing both server and client utilites. The MSYS adaptation of this has a much more modest objective: primarily to facilitate the mapping of POSIX style path names, as used in Makefiles and shell scripts, to suitable path names within the native Windows file system.
For more MSYS-specific information, please see the
If you have lost track of what shells, consoles, terminals and command line interfaces are: this description explains it and it also describes how MSYS and Cygwin fit into the picture: Shells, terminals and MSYS.
Programs included in MSYS
- basename
- bzip2
- cat
- chmod
- cmp
- comm
- cp
- cut
- date
- diff
- diff3
- dirname
- env
- expr
- false
- find
- fold
- gawk
- grep
- gzip
- head
- id
- info
- infokey
- install-info
- install
- less
- ln
- ls
- m4
- make
- makeinfo
- md5sum
- mkdir
- mount
- mv
- od
- patch
- ps
- rm
- rmdir
- rxvt
- sed
- sh
- sleep
- sort
- split
- tail
- tar
- tee
- texindex
- touch
- tr
- true
- uname
- uniq
- vim
- wc
- xargs
Download
It can be download from
Additional packages can be downloaded and installed to add more functionality to the shell; a full list of packages can be found on the package guide page.
Links
How to install MSYS
How to build MSYS
How to build MSYS from scratch
Environment
- ${HOME}/.profile is run when you start an MSYS shell. It is like ${HOME}/.bash_profile or ${HOME}/.bashrc on other systems.
- /etc/fstab is used to map Windows paths to a mount point.
- Windows drives are mapped without an fstab entry. Eg. C:\ is always mounted as /c.
- View file system mounts with the mount command.
- If your PATH has duplicate entries in it, /etc/fstab may contain redundant or unnecessary entries.
