Uninstalling Cygwin properly (.\setup.exe --uninstall ?)?

Fri May 23 15:15:03 GMT 2025

On Fri, May 23, 2025 at 7:47 AM Mark Liam Brown wrote:
> What is the official procedure to uninstall Cygwin properly? Just
> deleting C:\cygwin64 from Explorer yields lots of "malformed ACL
> warnings", and the registry still contains traces of Cygwin64

If the malformed ACLs bother you, reset ownership, permissions, and
file attributes, then delete. Example cmd.exe script:
takeown /f "<cygwinpath>" /r /d Y
icacls "<cygwinwinpath>" /reset /t /c /q
attrib -h -r -s "<cygwinpath>\*" /s
rd /s "<cygwinpath>"
If the leftover registry entries bother you, remove them.
If you have added the Cygwin bin directory to the system Path, you'd
need to remove that as well.
I don't know about "official," but that would be how you would uninstall it.