Unable to execute shell script in Cygwin as a KornShell script

I rarely touch shell scripts, we have another department who write them, so I have an understanding of writing them but no experience. However they all appear rather useless with my issue.

I am trying to execute some KornShell (ksh) scripts on a windows based machine using Cygwin- we use these to launch our Oracle WebLogic servers, now it simply will not execute. I used to be able to execute these exact same scripts fine on my old machine.

Now I have narrowed this down to the fact the 'magic number' or whatever it is at the start of the script where it specifies the script interpreter path:

i.e.:

#!/bin/ksh

if I change it to execute as a simple bash it works i.e:

#!/bin/sh

I went through checking the packages installed for cygwin - now the shells I installed are:

• mksh MirdBSD KornShell
• bash the bourne again shell
• zsh z shell

Should I expect to see a ksh.exe in my cygwin/bin directory? there is a system file 'ksh' which I was making an assume somehow associates it with one of the other shell exes, like mksh.exe

I understand my explanation may well be naff. But that being said, any help would be very much appreciated.

Thanks.

4 Answers

I believe the MirBSD korn shell is called mksh. You can verify this and look for the correct path by typing

% which mksh % which ksh 

or if you have no which,

% type -p mksh % type -p ksh 

or if that fails too, check /etc/shells which should list all valid shells on a system:

% grep ksh /etc/shells 

You need to put the full path after the #! line. It will probably be /bin/mksh, so your line needs to look like:

#!/bin/mksh 

You've probably fixed it by now, but the answer was no, your Cygwin does not (yet) know about ksh.

I solved this problem by launching the cygwin setup in command-line mode with the -P ksh attribute (as described in ).

You can run a ksh using a bat file

C:\cygwin\bin\dos2unix kshfilename.ksh

C:\cygwin\bin\bash kshfilename.ksh

Running a shell script through Cygwin on Windows

Install KornShell (ksh) into Cygwin by the following process:

1. Download: ksh.2012-08-06.cygwin.i386.gz
2. Install ksh via Cygwin setup.
   1. Execture Cygwin setup.exe
   2. Choose: Install from Local Directory
   3. Select the ksh.2012-08-06.cygwin.i386.gz as the Local Package Directory.
   4. Complete Cygwin setup.
3. Restart Cygwin.