It's existence is often a prerequisit to run certain applications which create symbolic links, fifos, or UNIX sockets in/dev. Also, the directories /dev/shmand /dev/mqueue are required to exist to use named POSIX semaphores, shared memory, and message queues, so a system without a real/dev directory is functionally crippled. In the default "C" locale, Cygwin creates filenames using the UTF-8 charset. This...
