setup-mingw.bat - A simple MinGW installer

What is setup-mingw.bat ?

setup-mingw.bat is a rather basic way to automatically download and install a working MinGW and MSYS environment from the files made available by the MinGW project on SourceForge. See http://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw/files/

setup-mingw.bat exists mainly because MinGW currently lacks an up to date GUI installer, and also because I don't like clicking on "Next" buttons anyway! When run, it does not prompt the user at all, it simply does its job. It therefore installs MinGW and MSYS into their respective "official default" locations, which are C:\mingw and C:\MSYS\1.0.11\ -- but these defaults can be changed by editing a couple of variables near the start of the batch file if necessary. It also downloads all the stuff it needs to install into a directory C:\mingw-files\ (again, you can change this default if you need to). Leaving these around makes things much faster if you later decide to reinstall MinGW and MSYS by re-running the script -- it will not download everything all over again if they already exist!

setup-mingw.bat has been tested on both Windows 2000 Pro and on Windows XP Pro, but not (yet) on Vista or Windows 7.

How to use setup-mingw.bat

Download setup-mingw.bat to somewhere on your Windows PC (or virtual machine), open up an MSDOS command shell, and run it. If you see notices about downloading or installing a couple of things (unzip and wget) by hand first, do what they ask you to do.

Requirements

You will need to download:

• http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/gnuwin32/unzip/5.51-1/unzip-5.51-1.exe
• http://downloads.sourceforge.net/gnuwin32/wget-1.11.4-1-bin.zip
• http://downloads.sourceforge.net/gnuwin32/wget-1.11.4-1-dep.zip

Download and run the first of the above, it is a simple GUI installer for the GNUwin32 unzip program. Click "Next" a few times to install it. We need this so setup-mingw.bat can unzip the other two files, among other things. Download those, and save them in C:\mingw-files\ so that setup-mingw.bat will find them there when it needs them.

Optionally, to create a more complete MSYS and MinGW environment, you can also download setup-mingw-extra-files.txt, which is a list of additional MinGW and MSYS files to be automatically downloaded and installed. Feel free to edit this as you wish to create yourself a customized MinGW and MSYS environment!

Notes and Warnings

This code comes with no warranty. If you run setup-mingw.bat and something bad or unexpected happens... you ran it, on your system, I accept no liability whatsoever.

The email address in a comment near the top of setup-mingw.bat can be used to contact me about it, if you need to do so. Please also consider joining the MinGW-users mailing list.