Running a shell script through Cygwin on Windows

Batch File Problem Overview

I have a bunch of shell scripts that used to run on a Linux machine. Now, we've switched over to Windows, and I need to run these scripts there. I have Cygwin installed, but is there a way to make the script run using Cygwin, but the call is made from Windows batch?

Batch File Solutions

Solution 1 - Batch File

Sure. On my (pretty vanilla) Cygwin setup, bash is in c:\cygwin\bin so I can run a bash script (say testit.sh) from a Windows batch file using a command like:

C:\cygwin\bin\bash testit.sh

... which can be included in a .bat file as easily as it can be typed at the command line, and with the same effect.

Solution 2 - Batch File

One more thing - if You edited the shell script in some Windows text editor, which produces the \r\n line-endings, cygwin's bash wouldn't accept those \r. Just run dos2unix testit.sh before executing the script:

C:\cygwin\bin\dos2unix testit.sh
C:\cygwin\bin\bash testit.sh

Solution 3 - Batch File

If you have access to the Notepad++ editor on Windows there is a feature that allows you to easily get around this problem:

Open the file that's giving the error in Notepad++.
Go under the "Edit" Menu and choose "EOL Conversion"
There is an option there for "UNIX/OSX Format." Choose that option.
Re-save the file.

I did this and it solved my problems.

Hope this helps!

Solution 4 - Batch File

Just wanted to add that you can do this to apply dos2unix fix for all files under a directory, as it saved me heaps of time when we had to 'fix' a bunch of our scripts.

find . -type f -exec dos2unix.exe {} \;

I'd do it as a comment to Roman's answer, but I don't have access to commenting yet.

Solution 5 - Batch File

The existing answers all seem to run this script in a DOS console window.

This may be acceptable, but for example means that colour codes (changing text colour) don't work but instead get printed out as they are:

> there is no item "[032mGroovy[0m"

I found this solution some time ago, so I'm not sure whether mintty.exe is a standard Cygwin utility or whether you have to run the setup program to get it, but I run like this:

D:\apps\cygwin64\bin\mintty.exe -i /Cygwin-Terminal.ico  bash.exe .\myShellScript.sh

... this causes the script to run in a Cygwin BASH console instead of a Windows DOS console.

Solution 6 - Batch File

If you don't mind always including .sh on the script file name, then you can keep the same script for Cygwin and Unix (Macbook).

To illustrate:

Always include .sh to your script file name, e.g., test1.sh
test1.sh looks like the following as an example:
#!/bin/bash echo '$0 = ' $0 echo '$1 = ' $1 filepath=$1
On Windows with Cygwin, you type "test1.sh" to run
On a Unix, you also type "test1.sh" to run

Note: On Windows, you need to use the file explorer to do following once:

Open the file explorer
Right-click on a file with .sh extension, like test1.sh
Open with... -> Select sh.exe
After this, your Windows 10 remembers to execute all .sh files with sh.exe.

Note: Using this method, you do not need to prepend your script file name with bash to run

Content Type	Original Author	Original Content on Stackoverflow
Question	rainman_s	View Question on Stackoverflow
Solution 1 - Batch File	Simon	View Answer on Stackoverflow
Solution 2 - Batch File	Roman Hocke	View Answer on Stackoverflow
Solution 3 - Batch File	jseals	View Answer on Stackoverflow
Solution 4 - Batch File	tsaulic	View Answer on Stackoverflow
Solution 5 - Batch File	mike rodent	View Answer on Stackoverflow
Solution 6 - Batch File	david m lee	View Answer on Stackoverflow