[eropple]

I don't agree with this advice at all. That you are stuck with cmd is really all that needs to be said.

On the other hand, Cygwin's gotten to the point where it, plus mintty, are actually pretty good--Cygwin used to be a real pain to work with (I mean, bad) but it's improved by leaps and bounds over the last few years. You can get a bash or zsh shell that work remarkably closely to OS X or Linux and just about every tool you're likely to run into will work as you expect. Contrast this to direct Windows ports of your software, which are frequently compromised to work in the fairly deranged environment of the Windows shell.

[digitalmaster]

I'm afraid i'm going to have to agree. Cygwin is wayyyy better that vanilla cmd on windows.