Using mintty as default terminal on Cygwin and default shell as bash

Question

There is already one answered the question at Best way to use a shell with Cygwin in Windows 7. That is to start Cygwin with C:\cygwin\bin\mintty.exe -

With that $SHELL = /bin/sh

How can I launch mintty with /usr/bin/bash as default shell?

score 14 · Accepted Answer · answered Aug 05 '13 at 17:47

14

There are several different ways to do it:

Specify bash as a command-line argument to mintty, as mentioned by Salton.
Set the Windows SHELL environment variable to /usr/bin/bash.
Make sure you have an /etc/passwd (see mkpasswd(1)) in your Cygwin environment, and set the shell for your UID to /usr/bin/bash. Cygwin doesn't supply a chsh or usermod command, so you'll probably have to edit the file by hand if you want to use this method.

From the mintty(1) manpage:

INVOCATION
   If a program name is supplied on the command line, this is executed
   with any additional arguments given.  Otherwise, mintty looks for a
   shell to execute in the SHELL environment variable.  If that is not
   set, it reads the user's default shell setting from /etc/passwd.  As a
   last resort, it falls back to /bin/sh.  If a single dash is specified
   instead of a program name, the shell is invoked as a login shell.

answered Aug 05 '13 at 17:47

James Sneeringer

2,592

For me the 3rd approach, setting up the shell in /etc/passwd is the best, so that mintty can be run as /path/to/mintty.exe [-i icon-file] -, with the trailing - we get a login shell which I usually start a screen session. – ryenus Apr 21 '14 at 01:28
/etc/passwd gets overwritten (sometimes?) when upgrading with Cygwin setup. – Dominykas Mostauskis Mar 12 '15 at 13:24
@ryenus what's the reason for that trailing -? Talk about difficult to google.. – Roy Truelove Aug 19 '16 at 01:21
@RoyTruelove to make it a login shell? Probably, please check bash manual – ryenus Aug 19 '16 at 09:50

score 5 · Answer 2 · answered Aug 05 '13 at 14:32

5

You can launch mintty bash for bash to be default

answered Aug 05 '13 at 14:32

Raza

4,109

score 4 · Answer 3 · edited Oct 28 '17 at 11:57

4

suppose this file name is mintty.bat, double click this file will open a mintty terminal, and with bash, path & pwd all settled down.

@echo off

C:\cygwin64\bin\mintty.exe /bin/bash --login -i

edited Oct 28 '17 at 11:57

Jeff Schaller

67,283
35
116
255

answered Oct 28 '17 at 11:30

cabincat

41

Using mintty as default terminal on Cygwin and default shell as bash

3 Answers3