<p>I'm in a Microsoft IE environment, but I want to use cygwin for a number of quick scripting tasks.</p>

<p>How would I configure it to use my windows proxy information?  Ruby gems, ping, etc are all trying to make direct connections.  How can I get them to respect the proxy information that IE and firefox use?</p>

I doubt that your corporate firewall allows PING, but the others all appear to be one form of http or another.  On a Linux system, you can set your HTTP proxy as an environment variable, so in bash, type:
```
```
export http_proxy=http://www.myproxy.com:3128
```
```
There is a similar environment variable for FTP (ftp_proxy).