Since the eCos development environment can run on both Windows and UNIX, and since there are three supported target architectures (MN10300, TX39, and PowerPC), we will use some notation conventions to avoid repeating instructions which are very similar to each other.
Cross-development commands like gcc and gdb are prefixed with information about the platform for which you are cross-compiling. For example, gcc for the MN10300 is invoked as mn10300-elf-gcc; for the TX39, gcc is invoked as mips-tx39-elf-gcc; and for the PowerPC it is powerpc-eabi-gcc. The same is true for gdb: the commands are mn10300-elf-gdb, mips-tx39-elf-gdb, and powerpc-eabi-gdb.
When you see examples that invoke gcc and gdb you should add the appropriate prefix for the architecture you are using.
The default directory for installing eCos on Windows (usually C:\Program Files\Cygnus Solutions\eCos) is different from that on UNIX (usually /usr/local/ecos-1.1). Since many command line examples in the tutorials use these paths, the base directory will be shown as BASE_DIR.
Windows and UNIX have similar file system syntax, but the MS-DOS command interpreter on Windows uses the backslash character (\) as a path separator, while UNIX and POSIX shells use the forward slash (/).
This document will use the POSIX shell convention of forward slashes.
The GCC cross compiler generates executable files with the .exe suffix on Windows, but not on UNIX.
We will omit the .exe suffix in executable file names. For example: we will write hello instead of hello.exe.