MSYS was created out of a long-lived desire to provide the MinGW community a Minimal SYStem, with which a configure script could be executed.

"Msys is just a native compiled [bash] plus some other native compiled [gnu] tools.  . . .
The point is there is a minimal [posix]-style command line environment that should just be enough to run configure scripts. Unlike [cygwin] which gives you a full [linux]-style command line and runtime environment. 
. . .  It's a minimal cygwin.  . . .
The main issue is that the configure result is suitable for [mingw] [gcc] to generate native compiled binaries."

http://www.mingw.org/msys.shtml

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'''What is MSYS?''' from the site

MSYS or Minimal SYStem is a POSIX and Bourne shell environment use with MinGW. It provides a hand picked set of tools to allow a typical configuration script with Bourne syntax to execute. This allows most of the GNU packages to create a Makefile just from executing the typical configure script which can then be used to build the package using the native MinGW version of GCC.

The POSIX layer used by MSYS is a fork of the 1.3.3 version of Cygwin. Cygwin is a full POSIX layer and UNIX-like environment for Win32 providing both server and client utilites.

For more MSYS-specific information, please see the MSYS section of this website: http://www.mingw.org/msys.shtml.

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'''See also'''

   * [cygwin]
   * [MinGW]

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[Category Porting]