All activity on this project has moved over to Google Code. Go here: The new home of apt-cyg, contributions invited.
apt-cyg is a command-line installer for Cygwin which cooperates with Cygwin Setup and uses the same repository. The syntax is based on apt-get but simplified. You can use commands like
- "apt-cyg install <package names>" to install packages
- "apt-cyg remove <package names>" to remove packages
- "apt-cyg update" to update setup.ini
- "apt-cyg show" to show installed packages
- "apt-cyg find <patterns>" to find packages matching patterns
- "apt-cyg describe <patterns>" to describe packages matching patterns
- "apt-cyg packageof <commands or files>" to locate parent packages
It's important to realize that apt-cyg cannot install Cygwin from scratch. Before you can use apt-cyg, bash, wget, tar, gawk and bzip2 must be installed. If you have already installed Cygwin and you are looking for a convenient way to install additional software from the command line, apt-cyg may be just what you need.
A dependency on the cols command was removed to simplify installation. I recommend you install cols and use "apt-cyg show | cols".
Version 0.56 of apt-cyg makes some improvements to the handling of setup files. A bzipped version of the file is now looked for, which makes downloads faster and also helps with possibly misconfigured mirror sites that don't have the uncompressed version. Thanks to Dan Poirier for pointing out the problem. Taking advantage of the faster download, apt-cyg now refreshes the setup file every time an install is performed rather than relying on a stale copy.
Version 0.55 of apt-cyg fixed a bug that occurred if more than one mirror was in use, and added the --file or -f option, which reads package names from a file. Thanks to Ryan Gies for the bug fix. Also in 0.55, all of the commands that could logically take more than one argument now do so, and the command line is now free-form, meaning that options, commands and package names can appear in any order.
apt-cyg has been around for a while now with very few bug reports, so it can be called stable software.
You can always find the latest version here.