cgminer is an open source, command-line, cross-platform and free GPU/ASIC/FPGA multi-threaded, multi-pool Bitcoin miner written in the C programming language. It also works with bitcoin-derivative coins and runs on the GNU/Linux, Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X operating systems.

Key features include very low non-mining CPU and RAM usage, support for stratum and GBT pooled mining protocol, scalable networking scheduler, long poll support, self detection of new blocks, proxy support, caching of submissions during transient network outages, preemptive fetching of work prior to completion of current work, as well as multicast support.

In addition to the above, we can mention that cgminer is compatible with a wide range of Bitcoin mining devices, including Bitforce, Icarus, Modminer, Submit-old, X-Reject-Reason, Bitburner, Bitfury USB stick, BFL SC ASIC, Klondike and KnCminer.

Another interesting features is that the application supports various proxy types, including HTTP 1.0, HTTP 1.1, SOCKS4, SOCKS5, SOCKS4a, as well as SOCKS5 with a hostname. It runs as an interactive daemon, in the background, and can be configured to start at boot.

The program is supported on virtually all GNU/Linux distributions, as it is available for download as a source archive, which requires you to configure and compile the program prior to installation. It has been successfully tested on both 32-bit and 64-bit computers.

cgminer is a cross-platform applications that runs well on GNU/Linux, Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X operating systems. It features the same options on all systems, so you only need to learn once how to use its multitude of functions. Run the cgminer --help command to view a list of all available commands.