How to View Installed Packages in Cygwin on Windows

Cygwin is free software that provides a Unix-like environment. It provides a toolset to users of any modern x86 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Microsoft Windows. Cygwin consists of a Unix system called emulation library, cygwin1.dll, together with a vast set of GNU and other free software applications organized into a large number of optional packages. In this article, you will learn how to view installed packages in Cygwin on Windows. Please see How To Fix “Startup Repair Couldn’t Repair Your PC, and how to Fix Windows Stuck on System Restore.

Among these packages are high-quality compilers and other software development tools, an X11 server, a complete X11 development toolkit, GNU emacs, TeX and LaTeX, OpenSSH (client and server), and much more, including everything needed to compile and use PhysioToolkit software under MS-Windows.

Note: Note: Cygwin does not provide a means for running GNU/Linux or other Unix binary executables under MS Windows. In order to run such software using Cygwin, that software must be compiled from its sources.

Cygwin provides all of the components needed to do this in most cases; most POSIX-compliant software, including X11 applications, can easily be ported to MS Windows using Cygwin.

Here are some related contents: How to install Ansible on Windows, how to install Kerberos packages in Windows via Cygwin, and how to determine Cygwin version.

View installed packages in Cygwin

The following commands can be used to check the status of the installed packages in Cygwin. You will have to use the scroll bar to scroll through if you have a lot of applications installed.

			
cygcheck –c
cygcheck --check-setup

1. The first method will prompt us with the following result using the command below “cygcheck –c“

Terminal screenshot displaying the output of the 'cygcheck -c' command, listing Cygwin packages with their version numbers and status indicators.

2. Using the second method, we will also have the same result as shown below “cygcheck –check-setup“

$ cygcheck --check-setup command output displaying Cygwin package information, including package names, versions, and status, with a focus on the command highlighted in red.

Please see How to install Kerberos packages with Cygwin on Windows, How to install additional packages via Cygwin, and How to determine Cygwin version in Windows.

I hope you found this blog post helpful on how to view installed packages in Cygwin in Windows. If you have any questions, please let me know in the comment session.