Portable Cygwin

Description:

I use a portable, flash drive, Cygwin installation for all my day to day network administering needs. In addition to all the other miscellanious tools spread throughout my website there are a handful of Cygwin specific tweaks and utilities I have made.

Launching Cygwin

I have two batch files: start_environment.bat and start_environment_readonly.bat The _readonly.bat file does not magically make Cygwin readonly - the hardware switch on my thumb drive does that. The _readonly.bat is the same as the other .bat it just doesn't try to make modifications when it starts up. It is very much worth noting that I am *not* the original author of those batch files - I started with somebody elses and built from there. I have however lost the link and cannot credit them.

For convenience, I have a utility called "wherever.exe". Wherever loops through your Windows drive letters in reverse order (that is, Z: to A: and looks for whatever argument you have specified. If it finds it, it runs it. This lets me have a shortcut on my desktop that runs "wherever start_environment.bat" that will start up my thumb drive regardless of what letter may have been assigned.

.bashrc

Once Cygwin starts up, I have some aliases and whatnot in my .bashrc file:

# cygwin ping needs to be admin, so lets avoid it
alias ping='echo Redirecting to Windows ping via alias:;/cygdrive/c/Windows/System32/ping'
alias tracert='echo Redirecting to Windows ping via alias:;/cygdrive/c/Windows/System32/tracert'

alias addwinpath='PATH=/cygdrive/c/Windows/System32/:$PATH'

I have my utilities in a top level folder on the thumbdrive called "Programs" so that they are easily usable from the windows side as well. For Cygwin, I have .bashrc find the drive and mount it as .bin. I do the same for my top level Documents and Backups folders as well.

# find my programs directory
cd /cygdrive

for d in *; do
        if [ -d "$d/Programs" ]; then
                PATH=$PATH:/cygdrive/$d/Programs
                PATH=$PATH:/cygdrive/$d/Programs/SublimeText
                PATH=$PATH:/cygdrive/$d/Programs/PuTTYPortable
                PATH=$PATH:/cygdrive/$d/Programs/WinSCPPortable

                ln -f -s /cygdrive/$d/Documents ~/Documents
                ln -f -s /cygdrive/$d/Programs ~/.bin
                ln -f -s /cygdrive/$d/Backups ~/Backups
        fi
done

~~I don't mount my paths to Desktop or Dropbox automatically, as Cygwin sometimes sticks immovable files there. Not sure why.~~(Edit: figured out why. I was neglecting to use the -T option with ln. Error in Eli, not in Cygwin.) I find the path to my windows profile using a utility I wrote called "DesktopPath.exe" since the windows profile location isn't predictable:

alias Desktop='cd `DesktopPath.exe --cygwin`'
alias linkDesktop='ln -f -s $desktoppath ~/Desktop'
alias linkDropbox='ln -f -s $desktoppath/../Dropbox ~/Dropbox'

Couple other aliases so I'm not dependent on $PATH

alias powershell='/cygdrive/c/Windows/system32/WindowsPowerShell/v1.0/powershell.exe'
alias cmd='/cygdrive/c/Windows/system32/cmd.exe'
alias ipconfig='/cygdrive/c/Windows/System32/ipconfig.exe'
alias adapters="cmd /C ncpa.cpl";

Instant ssh socks proxy server. This uses "proxy.exe" and predefinition of the .ssh stuff in .ssh/config

alias socks='proxy set example-socks && ssh example-socks'

Some other miscellanious aliases and settings...

alias ls='ls -hF --color'

alias h='history | grep $1'
export HISTFILESIZE=30000000    # save 300000 commands
export HISTCONTROL=ignoredups    # no duplicate lines in the history.
export HISTSIZE=10000000
shopt -s histappend

#No clobbering
alias rm="rm -i"
alias cp="cp -i"
alias mv="mv -i"

#Lazy
alias newxhtml="cp ~/.var/skel/xhtml.skel"
alias newpy="cp ~/.var/skel/py.skel"

alias clear='printf "\033c"'
alias reload='source ~/.bashrc'

In order to have ssh-agent function properly, I have two scripts - startagent and checkagent

# Ok - we don't want to be harrassed every time we start up if agent isn't running, so just a reminder and a start it manually.
# checkagent *should* fix the pid correctly in each new window.  Maybe.
alias startagent=". ~/.bin/startagent.sh"
~/.bin/checkagent

Finally, its important to always know where you are:

echo
echo -e "\033[44m                                    \033[40m"
echo -e "\033[44m YOU ARE USING THE BLUE THUMB DRIVE \033[40m"
echo -e "\033[44m                                    \033[40m"

... and whether or not you've run your backup lately:

# if test `find "~/.var/personal_backup_last_run" --mmin +10080`
if [ "$(( $(date +"%s") - $(stat -c "%Y" ~/.var/personal_backup_last_run) ))" -gt "604800" ]; then
        echo
        echo -e "\033[41m                                                  \033[40m"
        echo -e "\033[41m Personal Backup > 1 week old, you should run it. \033[40m"
        echo -e "\033[41m                                                  \033[40m"
fi

Inside of .bin I have (more or less) all my utilities, but specifically for Cygwin purposes I have:

hold - fixes pipe behavior in some cases going from one windows program to another
ips - greps IP addresses out of things
leak - fixes headered commands such as 'ls' and 'df' so you can use them with grep without losing the headers
startagent
checkagent
killall - simulate killall since I didn't have it in cygwin
proxy
deline - remove a specific line from a file, mostly for ssh known hosts
newcmd - spawn a new cmd.exe window nicely
wherever - src
DesktopPath - src

Updating Cygwin

I keep a top level directory called "cygwin-maintenance" on the thumb drive to run the installer from. At the time of this writing, my installed packages (via cygcheck -c) are these.