Re: Portable CygWin version for Windows?

[Christian Franke <Christian.Franke@t-online.de>]

Peter Steiner via Cygwin wrote:
> On webpage
>
> https://cygwin.com/
>
> I found only a CgyWin Installer to download.

I occasionally use Cygwin installed to NTFS partitions of USB flash 
drives for many years now. No problems so far, but the use cases were 
typically limited to "rescue" purposes (mintty, dd, ddrescue, fdisk, 
hexedit, smartctl, testdisk, ...). BTW: Also works great from the 
limited WinPE environment booted from a FAT32 boot partition on same 
flash drive.


> I prefer to put CygWin on an USB flash drive and run it on various 
> computers without leaving installation traces.

Please be aware that there will be traces on all computers because a 
registry value is set during startup of the root cygwin1.dll. The values 
appear below one of the following registry keys:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Cygwin\Installations
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Cygwin\Installations

A list is included in 'cygcheck -s' output. Alternatively try the 
following commands from Cygwin shell:

ls -la /proc/registry??/HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SOFTWARE/Cygwin/Installations
ls -la /proc/registry/HKEY_USERS/*/SOFTWARE/Cygwin/Installations

Regards,
Christian