Using telnet in Cygwin is very easy, but most people does not realize that it is not installed by default, therefore when you try to run telnet on a Cygwin shell you are instantly returned to the prompt. This happens because Cygwin finds the Microsoft telnet installed in your windows box and runs it; but this won't work in a Cygwin shell. To find out if this is the source of your problems type:

    $ which telnet
    /cygdrive/c/WINDOWS/system32/telnet

If you want to find out which of the binary versions of some file you are running under Cygwin you can try two commands: "which" and "type".
 
type -a ruby
 
Should return something similar to:
 
16:55:17 ~$ type -a rubyruby is /usr/bin/rubyruby is /bin/rubyruby is /usr/bin/rubySo would this:
 
which ruby
Cheers!

Some time ago I wrote a post on my blog on how to setup the looks of your Cygwin bash shell using rxvt. Well, I normally add a few more settings to my environment just to make it more useful.

For instance, I add the following lines to my ~/.bash_profile with some aliases to make it easier with directory surfing.

alias ls='ls --color=auto' alias ll='ls -lsa' alias l='ls -la'