On Sat, Mar 20, 2010 at 3:17 PM, David Antliff <david.antl...@gmail.com> wrote: > 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. >
Thx for the clarifications. Karthik Balaguru -- 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