Cygwin .bashrc goodness

Well, it's been a while since I wrote a blagoweb entry; the new job's been keeping me busy. But then Jon Micklos had to go and write an entry about how to add an ssh:// protocol to the Windows registry, and clearly I can't let him be the only recent Purdue grad in the PNW providing Windows tips on his interblag. Or something. Anyway.

For various reasons, I've found myself using Cygwin rather heavily of late. And by "rather heavily", I mean "eight hours a day". So I've hacked up some Cygwin-specific .bashrc snippets that make life a little easier. Before that, though, a recommendation: don't use Cygwin under cmd.exe. It works, but let's face it, cmd.exe just isn't a very good terminal emulator. Copy/pasting is painful. It's rather slow. And it doesn't play nice with a lot of Cygwin programs. PuTTY is a much better terminal emulator, and there's a hacked-up version here that lets you use it with Cygwin.

The problem now is that a lot of the Windows command-line tools don't play nice under PuTTY. They expect a cmd.exe terminal. And sometimes you might want to run a .cmd or .bat file; there may be some shebang magic you can do, but what I've done is add this to my .bashrc:

function winsh() {
 if [ "x${1}" != "x" ]; then
     P=${1}
 else
     P=.
 fi
 cmd /c start cmd /k "cd `cygpath -aw ${P}`"
}

This will open a new cmd.exe window at the specified directory, or the current directory if you didn't specify one. If you just run cmd, it will run inside the PuTTY window; cmd /c start cmd is the magic that opens up a new cmd.exe window, and the /k option is to send it to the directory of your choice.

The other snippet I put together is based on a useful utility available at OS X's command-line called open, which basically acts like you double-clicked on its argument (if you specify a directory, it opens it in Finder). I just wrote a Windows-equivalent:

function open() {
     explorer `cygpath -aw "$1"`
 }

With this you can do open /path/to/my.doc and it'll open up in Word just as if you'd double-clicked it.

That's all for today. I'll try to update more often. Until next time, adios!