Localization support has been much improved. Cygwin now handles locales using the underlying Windows locale support. The locale must exist in Windows to be recognized. New tool "getlocale" to fetch valid locale identifiers from Windows. Default charset for locales without explicit charset is now chosen from a list of Linux-compatible charsets. For instance: en_US -> ISO-8859-1, ja_JP -> EUC-JP, zh_TW -> Big5. Support for the @euro locale modifier to switch to the ISO-8859-15 charset. Default charset in the "C" or "POSIX" locale has been changed back from UTF-8 to ASCII, to avoid problems with applications expecting a singlebyte charset in the "C"/"POSIX" locale. Still use UTF-8 internally for filename conversion in this case. LC_COLLATE, LC_MONETARY, LC_NUMERIC, and LC_TIME localization is enabled via Windows locale support. fnmatch(3) call is now multibyte-aware. New strfmon(3) call. The console's backspace keycode can be changed using 'stty erase'. Support open(2) flags O_CLOEXEC and O_TTY_INIT flags. Support fcntl flag F_DUPFD_CLOEXEC. Support socket flags SOCK_CLOEXEC and SOCK_NONBLOCK. Add new Linux-compatible API calls accept4(2), dup3(2), and pipe2(2). Enhanced console window support. Function keys send distinguished escape sequences compatible with rxvt. Keypad keys send distinguished escape sequences, xterm-style. Support of combining Alt and AltGr modifiers in console window (compatible with xterm and mintty), so that e.g. Alt-@ sends ESC @ also on keyboards where @ is mapped to an AltGr combination. Report mouse wheel scroll events in mouse reporting mode 1000 (note: this doesn't seem to work on all systems, assumedly due to driver interworking issues). Add mouse reporting mode 1002 to report mouse drag movement. Add mouse reporting mode 1003 to report any mouse movement. Add focus event reporting (mode 1004), compatible with xterm and mintty. Add escape sequences for not bold (22), not invisible (28), not blinking (25) (compatible with xterm and mintty). Support VT100 line drawing graphics mode in console window (compatible with xterm and mintty). Recognize NWFS filesystem and workaround broken OS call. Windows 95, 98 and Me are not supported anymore. The new Cygwin 1.7 DLL will not run on any of these systems. Add support for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. Mount points are no longer stored in the registry. Use /etc/fstab and /etc/fstab.d/$USER instead. Mount points created with mount(1) are only local to the current session and disappear when the last Cygwin process in the session exits. Cygwin creates the mount points for /, /usr/bin, and /usr/lib automatically from it's own position on the disk. They don't have to be specified in /etc/fstab. If a filename cannot be represented in the current character set, the character will be converted to a sequence Ctrl-X + UTF-8 representation of the character. This allows to access all files, even those not having a valid representation of their filename in the current character set. To always have a valid string, use the UTF-8 charset by setting the environment variable $LANG, $LC_ALL, or $LC_CTYPE to a valid POSIX value, for instance in Cygwin.bat like this: set LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 PATH_MAX is now 4096. Internally, path names can be as long as the underlying OS can handle (32K). struct dirent now supports d_type, filled out with DT_REG or DT_DIR. All other file types return as DT_UNKNOWN for performance reasons. The CYGWIN environment variable options "ntsec" and "smbntsec" have been replaced by the per-mount option "acl"/"noacl". The CYGWIN environment variable option "ntea" has been removed without substitute. The CYGWIN environment variable option "check_case" has been removed in favor of real case-sensitivity on file systems supporting it. Creating filenames with special DOS characters '"', '*', ':', '<', '>', '|' is supported. Creating files with special DOS device filename components ("aux", "nul", "prn") is supported. File names are case sensitive if the OS and the underlying file system supports it. Works on NTFS and NFS. Does not work on FAT and Samba shares. Requires to change a registry key (see the User's Guide). Can be switched off on a per-mount basis. Due to the above changes, managed mounts have been removed. Incoming DOS paths are always handled case-insensitive and get no POSIX permission, as if they are mounted with noacl,posix=0 mount flags. unlink(2) and rmdir(2) try very hard to remove files/directories even if they are currently accessed or locked. This is done by utilizing the hidden recycle bin directories and marking the files for deletion. rename(2) rewritten to be more POSIX conformant. access(2) now performs checks using the real user ID, as required by POSIX; the old behavior of querying based on effective user ID is available through the new faccessat(2) and euidaccess(2) APIs. Add st_birthtim member to struct stat. File locking is now advisory, not mandatory anymore. The fcntl(2) and the new lockf(2) APIs create and maintain locks with POSIX semantics, the flock(2) API creates and maintains locks with BSD semantics. POSIX and BSD locks are independent of each other. Implement atomic O_APPEND mode. New open(2) flags O_DIRECTORY, O_EXEC and O_SEARCH. Make the "plain file with SYSTEM attribute set" style symlink default again when creating symlinks. Only create Windows shortcut style symlinks if CYGWIN=winsymlinks is set in the environment. Symlinks now use UTF-16 encoding for the target filename for better internationalization support. Cygwin 1.7 can read all old style symlinks, but the new style is not compatible with older Cygwin releases. Handle NTFS native symlinks available since Vista/2008 as symlinks (but don't create Vista/2008 symlinks due to unfortunate OS restrictions). Recognize NFS shares and handle them using native mechanisms. Recognize and create real symlinks on NFS shares. Get correct stat(2) information and set real mode bits on open(2), mkdir(2) and chmod(2). Recognize MVFS and workaround problems manipulating metadata and handling DOS attributes. Recognize Netapp DataOnTap drives and fix inode number handling. Recognize Samba version beginning with Samba 3.0.28a using the new extended version information negotiated with the Samba developers. Stop faking hardlinks by copying the file on filesystems which don't support hardlinks natively (FAT, FAT32, etc.). Just return an error instead, just like Linux. List servers of all accessible domains and workgroups in // instead of just the servers in the own domain/workgroup. Support Linux-like extended attributes ([fl]getxattr, [fl]listxattr, [fl]setxattr, [fl]removexattr). New file conversion API for conversion from Win32 to POSIX path and vice versa (cygwin_conv_path, cygwin_create_path, cygwin_conv_path_list). New openat family of functions: openat, faccessat, fchmodat, fchownat, fstatat, futimesat, linkat, mkdirat, mkfifoat, mknodat, readlinkat, renameat, symlinkat, unlinkat. Other new APIs: posix_fadvise, posix_fallocate, funopen, fopencookie, open_memstream, open_wmemstream, fmemopen, fdopendir, fpurge, mkstemps, eaccess, euidaccess, canonicalize_file_name, fexecve, execvpe. New implementation for blocking sockets and select on sockets which is supposed to allow POSIX-compatible sharing of sockets between threads and processes. send/sendto/sendmsg now send data in 64K chunks to circumvent an internal buffer problem in WinSock (KB 201213). New send/recv option MSG_DONTWAIT. IPv6 support. New APIs getaddrinfo, getnameinfo, freeaddrinfo, gai_strerror, in6addr_any, in6addr_loopback. On IPv6-less systems, replacement functions are available for IPv4. On systems with IPv6 enabled, the underlying WinSock functions are used. While I tried hard to get the functionality as POSIXy as possible, keep in mind that a *fully* conformant implementation of getaddrinfo and other stuff is only available starting with Windows Vista/2008. Resolver functions (res_init, res_query, res_search, res_querydomain, res_mkquery, res_send, dn_comp, dn_expand) are now part of Cygwin. Applications don't have to link against minires anymore. Actually, this *is* the former libminires.a. rcmd is now implemented inside of Cygwin, instead of calling the WinSock function. This allows rsh(1) usage on Vista/2008 and later, which dropped this function from WinSock. Define multicast structures in netinet/in.h. Note that fully conformant multicast support is only available beginning with Vista/2008. Improve get_ifconf. Redefine struct ifreq and subsequent datastructures to be able to keep more information. Support SIOCGIFINDEX, SIOCGIFDSTADDR and the Cygwin specific SIOCGIFFRNDLYNAM. Support real interface flags on systems supporting them. Other new APIs: bindresvport, bindresvport_sa, gethostbyname2, iruserok_sa, rcmd_af, rresvport_af. getifaddrs, freeifaddrs, if_nametoindex, if_indextoname, if_nameindex, if_freenameindex. Add /proc/net/if_inet6. Reworked pipe implementation which uses overlapped IO to create more reliable interruptible pipes and fifos. The CYGWIN environment variable option "binmode" has been removed. Improved fifo handling by using native Windows named pipes. Detect when a stdin/stdout which looks like a pipe is really a tty. Among other things, this allows a debugged application to recognize that it is using the same tty as the debugger. Support UTF-8 in console window. In the console window the backspace key now emits DEL (0x7f) instead of BS (0x08), Alt-Backspace emits ESC-DEL (0x1b,0x7f) instead of DEL (0x7f), same as the Linux console and xterm. Control-Space now emits an ASCII NUL (0x0) character. Support up to 64 serial interfaces using /dev/ttyS0 - /dev/ttyS63. Support up to 128 raw disk drives /dev/sda - /dev/sddx. New API: cfmakeraw, get_avphys_pages, get_nprocs, get_nprocs_conf, get_phys_pages, posix_openpt. A lot of character sets are supported now via a call to setlocale(). The setting of the environment variables $LANG, $LC_ALL or $LC_CTYPE will be used. For instance, setting $LANG to "de_DE.ISO-8859-15" before starting a Cygwin session will use the ISO-8859-15 character set in the entire session. The default locale in the absence of one of the aforementioned environment variables is "C.UTF-8". The full list of supported character sets: "ASCII", "ISO-8859-x" with x in 1-16, except 12, "UTF-8", Windows codepages "CPxxx", with xxx in (437, 720, 737, 775, 850, 852, 855, 857, 858, 862, 866, 874, 1125, 1250, 1251, 1252, 1253, 1254, 1255, 1256, 1257, 1258), "KOI8-R", "KOI8-U", "SJIS", "GBK", "eucJP", "eucKR", and "Big5". Allow multiple concurrent read locks per thread for pthread_rwlock_t. Implement pthread_kill(thread, 0) as per POSIX. New API for POSIX IPC: Named semaphores: sem_open, sem_close, sem_unlink. Message queues: mq_open, mq_getattr, mq_setattr, mq_notify, mq_send, mq_timedsend, mq_receive, mq_timedreceive, mq_close, mq_unlink. Shared memory: shm_open, shm_unlink. Only declare expected functions in <strings.h>, don't include <string.h> from here. Support for WCONTINUED, WIFCONTINUED() added to waitpid and wait4. New APIs: _Exit, confstr, insque, remque, sys_sigabbrev, posix_madvise, posix_memalign, reallocf, exp10, exp10f, pow10, pow10f, lrint, lrintf, rint, rintf, llrint, llrintf, llrintl, lrintl, rintl, mbsnrtowcs, strcasestr, stpcpy, stpncpy, wcpcpy, wcpncpy, wcsnlen, wcsnrtombs, wcsftime, wcstod, wcstof, wcstoimax, wcstok, wcstol, wcstoll, wcstoul, wcstoull, wcstoumax, wcsxfrm, wcscasecmp, wcsncasecmp, fgetwc, fgetws, fputwc, fputws, fwide, getwc, getwchar, putwc, putwchar, ungetwc, asnprintf, dprintf, vasnprintf, vdprintf, wprintf, fwprintf, swprintf, vwprintf, vfwprintf, vswprintf, wscanf, fwscanf, swscanf, vwscanf, vfwscanf, vswscanf. Getting a domain user's groups is hopefully more bulletproof now. Cygwin now comes with a real LSA authentication package. This must be manually installed by a privileged user using the /bin/cyglsa-config script. The advantages and disadvantages are noted in http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin-developers/2006-11/msg00000.html Cygwin now allows storage and use of user passwords in a hidden area of the registry. This is tried first when Cygwin is called by privileged processes to switch the user context. This allows, for instance, ssh public key sessions with full network credentials to access shares on other machines. New options have been added to the mkpasswd and mkgroup tools to ease use in multi-machine and multi-domain environments. The existing options have a slightly changed behaviour. New ldd utility, similar to Linux. New link libraries libdl.a, libresolve.a, librt.a. Fallout from the long path names: If the current working directory is longer than 260 bytes, or if the current working directory is a virtual path (like /proc, /cygdrive, //server), don't call native Win32 programs since they don't understand these paths. On the first usage of a DOS path (C:\foo, \\foo\bar), the Cygwin DLL emits a scary warning that DOS paths shouldn't be used. This warning may be disabled via the new CYGWIN=nodosfilewarning setting. The CYGWIN environment variable option "server" has been removed. Cygwin automatically uses cygserver if it's available. Allow environment of arbitrary size instead of a maximum of 32K. Don't force uppercase environment when started from a non-Cygwin process. Except for certain Windows and POSIX variables which are always uppercased, preserve environment case. Switch back to old behaviour with the new CYGWIN=upcaseenv setting. Detect and report a missing DLL on process startup. Add /proc/registry32 and /proc/registry64 paths to access 32 bit and 64 bit registry on 64 bit systems. Add the ability to distinguish registry keys and registry values with the same name in the same registry subtree. The key is called "foo" and the value will be called "foo%val" in this case. Align /proc/cpuinfo more closly to Linux content. Add /proc/$PID/mounts entries and a symlink /proc/mounts pointing to /proc/self/mounts as on Linux. Optimized strstr and memmem implementation. Remove backwards compatibility with old signal masks. (Some *very* old programs which use signal masks may no longer work correctly). Cygwin now exports wrapper functions for libstdc++ operators new and delete, to support the toolchain in implementing full C++ standards conformance when working with shared libraries. Different Cygwin installations in different paths can be run in parallel without knowing of each other. The path of the Cygwin DLL used in a process is a key used when creating IPC objects. So different Cygwin DLLs are running in different namespaces. Each Cygwin DLL stores its path and installation key in the registry. This allows troubleshooting of problems which could be a result of having multiple concurrent Cygwin installations.