On Sat, Mar 20, 2010 at 20:42, Karthik Balaguru wrote: > On Sun, Mar 14, 2010 at 7:12 AM, David Antliff wrote: >> On Sun, Mar 14, 2010 at 13:26, Karthik Balaguru wrote: >>> Since cygwin is a windows utility that provides linux environment. >>> What is the probability of the linux environment to get infected by >>> virus ? >> >> Hello Karthik, >> >> I don't entirely understand your question - are you asking whether a >> Windows virus infection can affect files manipulated by Cygwin on that >> same system? I would imagine the answer is yes if Cygwin is using >> standard OS facilities to read/write files. > > Yeah, You are Correct. My actual question was related > to this query. I was eager to know if the files touched by > cygwin(Linux environment) would get infected due to an > virus in Windows system ?
Cygwin is just an application library upon Windows - there's no isolation from Windows. If something screws with Windows, then Cygwin can be affected too. > This is other thought that i had in my mind while thinking > about protecting files in linux environment(Cygwin) against > that of windows. Is it possible ? Cygwin isn't Linux. It just feels like Linux because many of the same applications are provided. But it isn't Linux. > Thinking over the similar lines, another query popped up > in my mind - Is cygwin more vulnerable to Windows based > Virus or Linux based Virus ? Cygwin isn't Linux, so it's not vulnerable to Linux-based viruses at all really. Cygwin is just an application on Windows, so yes, Cygwin is vulnerable to Windows based viruses and I'd imagine almost completely immune to Linux-based viruses unless they are silly Perl or shell script worms for example. That said, a security issue affecting something like OpenSSH could also be a problem in Cygwin. It really depends on where the root cause of the problem is that allows the issue to arise. In a nutshell - Cygwin is part of Windows. It's not an operating system in its own right. It's definitely not Linux. It just happens to do a lot of things that Linux can do because the same applications (like perl, bash, emacs, etc) are available. Hope this is helpful - if not, perhaps tell us what you want to achieve. -- David. -- Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/ Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
