I'm reinstalling everything on my machine, ..., and amongst those is cygwin. I'm trying to avoid reinstallation, partly because, I don't even know what is it that I installed last time in it. So my question is, can I just move the cygwin directory from one machine to another, and expect everything to work, or are there some other important settings that I need to move as well?
As far as I saw, it's pretty self containable, but one never knows.
No, you have to reinstall it from the cygwin installer, sorry!
Most importantly you'll want to copy everything from your home directory (default is c:/cygwin/home/) especially anything w/ a "." in front of the filename.
As for individual application preferences, etc., you may lose those -- but if you do the reinstall while you still have access to your old machine -- you can probably get to 90% of your previous install without too much trouble.
Yep! Go for it. You won't encounter any problems.
You can just copy the entire cygwin directory to your new machine, open up the cygwin shell and everything (as long as you are only calling cygwin-internal programs and stuff that's within the path) will just work as if you you are working on your old machine.
The only thing you'll loose is the directory where the "already downloaded and compressed" packages for a possible re-installation are stored. Fortunately this directory is optional, so no problem for migration to another platform. You could copy that directory as well, but most likely all the packages that you have are outdated anyways and a run of setup.exe would fetch the new versions anyway...
Btw - since someone said exactly the opposite some real-life experience: I use this feature quite often with success. I've copied my cygwin dir to USB-sticks and used it on friends computers. I also copied it to the laptop of my fiance when we go to holidays and take a laptop with us.
It always worked without any problems....