msysgit on windows — what should I be aware of, if any?

Question

This is related to another question I asked recently.

When installing msysgit, the installer presents 3 options related to system path:

1. Never change

Answer 1

The MSYS Git installer suggests option 2 if you intend on running git from a cygwin prompt. The cygwin environment ensures that git dependencies are in your PATH. If you choose this option but then invoke git from a windows command prompt, all of the unix-y command-line utilities that git relies upon will not be found. IIRC, git itself is partially implemented as bash scripts. I don't know which operations will fail, but I do not think that git will be usable this way.

I don't have a list of the system tools that option 3 overrides (the installer mentions find.exe) but this would only affect you if you are a batch-script ninja. At the command-line, find will now refer to the unix utility of that name, not the exe that ships with windows. It doesn't harm windows itself in any way.

Just run with scissors and choose option 3 :-)