How to run internal cmd command from the msys shell?
Search your %PATH% for cmd.cmd or cmd.bat. They may interfere with your cmd
Run Process Monitor and run your
cmd /c mklink
. Examine ProcMon log for really executed commands.
win7/cygwin/bash had same problem, solution is to launch cmd twice,
and convert slashes to backslashes as needed by cmd (for example):
REPO_DIR=${REPO_DIR////\\} # Example, Turn c:/cvs into c:\cvs for cmd
cmd /C "cmd /C mklink /D .Repo $REPO_DIR" # launch cmd /C cmd /C cmd
Process Monitor helped track down the issue. It is that
msys
will convert/c
toc:\
; it needs to be escaped:cmd //c mklink
. The way these conversions are done is explained here. – Mihai Rotaru Jan 1 '13 at 21:32
I could not get this to work based on Mihai's comment alone, because the path still contained forward slashes /
in it, and mklink
complained that /msys64
was not a valid switch.
So I wrote a batch script to get it working.
Here's how I call my batch script from MSYS:
$ mingw_ln.bat "$destination" "$targetpath"
And, the batch script takes those two paths, and converts /
to \
, using the :OLD=NEW
parameter expansion syntax for string replacements.1
set LINK=%1
set TARGET=%2
REM Convert POSIX paths to Windows paths
set LINK=%LINK:/=\%
set TARGET=%TARGET:/=\%
mklink /D %LINK% %TARGET%
1 This is similar to bash's ${PARAM:/OLD/NEW}
syntax, for those familiar with it