How can I use HSI or HTAR under Cygwin in Windows?

The Cygwin tools are ports of the popular GNU development tools for Microsoft Windows. They use the Cygwin library, which provides the Unix system calls and environment these programs expect. With Cygwin installed on your Windows computer, you can use HSI or HTAR to connect to HPSS/SDA at Indiana University. HSI is fast, robust, and user-friendly, and provides the best performance interface between IU's supercomputers and HPSS. HSI also automatically selects the best class of service for a given upload.

At IU, you can use Cygwin from XLiveCD, which is available from this page (IU Network ID required). You also can download Cygwin from the Cygwin Mirror Sites page.

At IU, you can download versions of HSI and HTAR that work with Cygwin from this page (IU Network ID required.)

To run HSI/HTAR under Cygwin, you need to unblock the Windows firewall for HSI data transfer (see When I retrieve files from SDA using HSI, why am I getting "*** get: Error -1 on transfer"?). Use the firewall -on command to get around the firewall if you can't modify the firewall rules.

If you use Unix or FTP, HSI commands will seem familiar. Following is a sample session (% is the Unix shell prompt; ? is the HSI prompt):

Below is an example for using HTAR once you have opened a Cygwin command shell:

The error above can be fixed by creating the /cygdrive/c/tmp directory.

For more, see At IU, how do I use HSI to access my SDA account?

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