Speeding up Cygwin

Yesterday I mentioned my success with Cygwin. One issue I did have though was with the speed of startup. It was taking 15-20 seconds to start a BASH shell. It turns out that this was a PATH issue. I went through my Windows PATH and cleared out the clutter. Now it takes just around 3-4 seconds for a full BASH login and less still for just running a script. I now find myself using the BASH shell for all sorts of things and I’ve set up a number of alias’s to switch to folders I’m using a lot and to open common documents. One handy function I’ve added to .bashrc (so it is always available) works out the current working version of a document. It assumes that you keep copies that have a version number or date in the file name that will sort correctly. You can find the code on my development blog. Here are a few more alias’s I use: