I want to setup a minimal set of cygwin applications (ls, diff, path, find, grep) so that they run on a machine without the full cygwin install.
I am assuming all I need are the *.exe files and *.dll that are relevant. So far, this is what I have. It works so far, but I was wondering if there are any issues down the road that I might experience.
One issue I can see is licensing. You may need to research under what conditions you are allowed to redistribute binaries. (It may be a simple as including a statement in a README file about where to obtain the source.)
Another issue is Cygwin updates. When new binaries are released, how will you keep end users up to date?
A third potential problem would be configuration files that an application would need. No doubt this would be easy enough to figure out in testing, however.
Have you considered MinGW? It would seem to fit your purposes better than Cygwin.
Not really, but you might want to look at UnxUtils, which has some advantages over cygwin for the sort of application you're describing:
It does not depend on an external DLL.
The executables use msvcrt.dll, rather than cygwin.dll so they play nicely with native windows paths. There is no disconnect between the /cygdrive path and the native paths used by the rest of the system.
Because of (2) it integrates much more nicely into command or bat files if you have occasion to have to do this.
UnxUtils is quite good for deploying functionality like sed to windows machines because you can just drop sed.exe into an application directory and not have to worry about registering any DLL's or other installation complexities. CMD.exe will pipe and redirect well enough to use these in batch files, and the utilities do not mind \r\n line terminators.
There is also the GnuWin32 project. I use that and CygWin, so sometimes I have a hard-time telling what kind of environment I'm working in..... not that that's a bad thing!