Cygwin ls command not found

Question

This is a question that I self-answered on my tech blog where I keep the tech-tips which I need to give to myself from time to time, so I decided to move it over here instead. The original blog post is here: http://thehacklist.blogspot.com/2009/04/cygwin-ls-command-not-found.html

If you are a linux enthusiast and really miss those greps and sed/awks on the windows box, you've probably installed cygwin. You tried running it either by double-clicking the cygwin icon on your desktop or the cygwin.bat file in your C:\cygwin directory and got the bash-3.X$ prompt. However, although the pwd or cd commands work, if you try ls, it says:ls: command not found.

Guys, why do you close cygwin related topics? If you are developer and never used it, it doesn't mean that other developers should not use it too. please do not close these topics. Thanks. — Kostanos, Sep 08 '13 at 17:38
By the way, if you closed this one, you probably should close all other related cygwin topics: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/225764/safely-change-home-directory-in-cygwin for example. — Kostanos, Sep 08 '13 at 17:49
Thank you for the post, this was really helpful to me. I think it's unfortunate it was closed. — AmericanUmlaut, Mar 03 '14 at 19:09
closing such topic seriously... why you even have the cygwin tag then — Mubashar, Sep 29 '15 at 05:14
Nice find! Do you know what caused this to happen though? I'm really curious, I have installed cygwin multiple times in all possible windows OS and this is the first time it happened to me in Windows 10 Version 1607 Build 14393.187. — laertis, Sep 30 '16 at 07:27

Sudipta Chatterjee · Accepted Answer · 2021-12-22T19:03:27.033

95

Right click on "My Computer" -> Properties -> Advanced -> Environment Variables
Add a new environment variable, called CYGWIN_HOME and set its value to C:\cygwin
Edit the PATH environment variable and add %CYGWIN_HOME%\bin to it (usually separated by a ';').
Just click okay, exit any command prompts or bash shells (over cygwin) you may have open, and open it again - it'll work!

Assumption - this assumes that you have installed cygwin at C:\cygwin. If you've kept it someplace else, please modify the above accordingly.

edited Dec 22 '21 at 19:03

answered Feb 10 '13 at 11:25

Sudipta Chatterjee

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didn't work for me – hexicle Aug 21 '13 at 16:22
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It works! @Raindrop be sure you followed instructions and closed all opened consoles. If you use guake style console, go to menu->File->Exit. – Kostanos Sep 08 '13 at 17:44
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doesn't work for me either – S Gaber Apr 15 '14 at 20:55
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Possibly doesn't work for some people because they installed Cygwin elsewhere. If you have a 64-bit OS, your Cygwin path may be `C:\cygwin64`. – XedinUnknown Oct 15 '15 at 09:25
Doesn't work, fantastic. – Erik Vesterlund Nov 20 '16 at 05:38
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does not work on windows 8 - 32bits, @michael_n solutions works adding "C:\cygwin\bin;C:\cygwin;" to PATH in environment variables – stackdave Mar 25 '17 at 16:20
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@stackdave thx. I add the two path to the enviroment and it works. – Allen Vork Jun 12 '17 at 06:29
not working w10 – Geomorillo Jul 16 '18 at 15:06
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worked flawlessly! tail command wasn't working before adding "CYGWIN_HOME" environment variable. – Gaurav Mar 21 '19 at 13:04
This did not work for me. I wanted to post a solution that works for me but the question is closed. Great. This happened to me after an update. Simply re-creating the shortcut solved the problem for me. – aggregate1166877 Feb 06 '20 at 01:49
That's a "bad" idea - some GNU commands have the same name as the DOS ones - mixing the WIN32 paths with Cygwin ones will break .bat files – gabriel_agm Apr 02 '20 at 16:58
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I think that step 3. could be "Edit the PATH environment variable and add `%CYGWIN_HOME%\bin` to it (usually separated by a ';')." – Stano Dec 21 '21 at 10:03

score 15 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 10 '13 at 11:34

15

Check the cygwin.bat file, it should have something like:

set PATH=C:\cygwin\bin;C:\cygwin;%PATH%
...etc
bash --login -i

(you don't really need c:\cygwin in there, but I have some additional scripts/bat files there; the key thing is c:\cygwin\bin)

answered Feb 10 '13 at 11:34

michael

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this worked for me on windows 8 , 32 bits – stackdave Mar 25 '17 at 16:20
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For me at least, it's now C:\cygwin64\bin\ – djsmiley2kStaysInside May 17 '18 at 10:02

Cygwin ls command not found

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