 <p>Cygwin is not an isolated environment like for example a virtual machine inside VirtualBox. It works on the same filesystem as other Windows applications. Its files could be accessed through any file manager (e.g: Total Commander), and it can access any other file including your home folder in Windows.</p> <p>Only one thing makes confusion: cygwin uses UNIX-like paths but Windows uses DOS paths. There is a translation method to convert them vica-versa. <a href="https://www.cygwin.com/cygwin-ug-net/cygpath.html" rel="nofollow">cygpath</a> utility can do this translation automatically, but it could be done by head as well. Here is some example:</p> <pre><code>############################################# # converting to Windows path format: ############################################# $ cygpath --windows / C:\cygwin $ cygpath --windows /home C:\cygwin\home $ cygpath --windows /home/username C:\cygwin\home\username $ cygpath --windows /cygdrive/c C:\ ############################################# # converting to Cygwin (UNIX) path format: ############################################# $ cygpath --unix 'C:\Users\username' /cygdrive/c/Users/username $ cygpath --unix 'C:\Windows' /cygdrive/c/Windows $ cygpath --unix 'D:\Games' /cygdrive/d/Games </code></pre>