Cygwin provides a lot of UNIX based tools on the Win32 platform. It uses a UNIX emulation layer which might be a bit slower compared to the native Win32 tools, but at an acceptable level. The installation and update is pretty easy and done through a single (web based) setup.exe.

The native Win32 tools will typically be a bit faster, but more complicated to install, as you would have to download the tools from different webpages, and install them in different ways, tweaking the PATH and alike.

	Note!
	As there's no Win32 native bash version available, at least a basic installation of cygwin is required in any case.

Although Cygwin consists of several separate packages, the installation and update is done through a single setup.exe, which acts similar to other web based installers. All tools will be installed into one base folder, the default is C:\cygwin.

You will find this network based setup.exe at: http://www.cygwin.com/. Click on one of the "Install Cygwin now" appearances to download the setup.exe. After the download completed, start this setup.exe on your machine.

The setup will ask you for some settings, the defaults should usually work well for a first start. At the "Select Packages" page, you'll need to select some additional packages, which are not installed by default. Navigate to the required Category/Package row and click on the "Skip" item in the "New" column so it shows a version number for the required package

After clicking the Next button several times, the setup will then download and install the selected packages (this may take a while, depending on the package size).

Under: "Start -> Programs -> Cygwin -> Cygwin Bash Shell" you should now be able to start a new Cygwin bash shell, which is similar to the command line (command.com/cmd.exe) in Win32, but much more powerful.