os/windows/ CygWin

I'd not survive on Windows without CygWin. But Crlf issues are a problem with bash. To fix these, set SHELLOPTS in your user environment variables to

SHELLOPTS=braceexpand:emacs:hashall:histexpand:history:igncr:interactive-comments:monitor

Cygwin can make a mess of permissions, since permissions don't work in Windows in the same way as *nix. If all your cygwin activity happens within the C:\cygwin64\ space there is no problem, but if you routinely use cygwin outside of there (e.g. in your Windows home foloder), you want to edit /etc/fstab and insert noacl as below:

none /cygdrive cygdrive binary,posix=0,user,noacl 0 0

To have an equivalent of sudo

#!/usr/bin/bash
cygstart --action=runas "$@"

Importantly, sudo bash gets you an bash with elevated privileges, which can be useful for running a lot of installers without multiple UAC alerts.

SSH Issues

When ssh'ing to a Windows machine, your login shell is cmd.exe, which is not very useful. If you try and run C:\cygwin64\bin\bash, then you'll find that your HOME is set to e.g. C:\Users\mrflibble and not /home/mrflibble as it should be. My simple solution is the following combination of a .bat file for cmd to run, and a .sh file for bash which sets HOME correctly and then execs bash.

@C:\cygwin64\bin\bash.exe cygbash.sh

and

export HOME=/home/"$USER"
exec /bin/bash --login