Getting cURL to work in Cygwin

Cygwin is a great option for Windows users who want to run Linux software. However, it doesn't always work "right." In my case, trying to install packages in Octave from repositories on GitHub simply would not work. The root cause seems to be that curl wouldn't connect for a variety of reasons, one being the inability to ''resolve the host'', the other being the inability to follow redirects (which I wasn't aware of happening for a very long time)

Two options came to solve the issue.

1. The -4 option, which helped resolve the host
2. The -L option, which enables curl to follow redirects.

With that, the call

curl -4 -L https://github.com/vibrationtoolbox/ovtoolbox/archive/master.zip > vtoolbox_temp.zip

works and can be used in the Octave system command.