I've decided not to attempt support for Cygwin in the next version of Boost.Filesystem. Cygwin's lack of library support for wchar_t is the problem . For the current Boost.Filesystem version (v2), the necessary workarounds are so pervasive that the implementation code is much harder to read and maintain. Witness the number of bug reports that are Cygwin specific. For v3, currently under development, trying to support Cygwin would be even harder, and would cause a serious delay in development. Plus I'm tired of waiting for the cygwin folks to come into full C++ conformance. IIUC, the reason Cygwin doesn't provide C++ standard library support for wchar_t is that the underlying C library is missing the C wchar_t functions. Perhaps Boosters who care about Cygwin could spearhead an effort to add the missing C support? The needed functionality isn't all that complex; the main problem might be just learning enough about how Cygwin/GCC is configured and built to be able to add a fairy small number of C functions. Thoughts? --Beman