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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-18T14:13:06+00:00

I am trying to run Rails under Cygwin but when I type rails -v

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I am trying to run Rails under Cygwin but when I type “rails -v” it finds “rails” and throws an error. When I type “rails.bat -v” it works just fine. Either works fine in the native Windows command processor because it uses PATHEXT to identify executables like .BAT.

I added a line to .bash_profile as follows and it is setting the variable, as far as I can tell.

export PATHEXT=".RB;.COM;.EXE;.BAT;.CMD;.VBS;.VBE;.JS;.JSE;.WSF;.WSH;.MSC"

This is my output:

$ echo $PATH
/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/cygdrive/c/Program Files/Common Files/Microsoft Shared/Windows Live:/cygdrive/c/Program Files (x86)/Common Files/Microsoft Shared/Windows Live:/cygdrive/c/Program Files (x86)/NVIDIA Corporation/PhysX/Common:/cygdrive/c/Windows/system32:/cygdrive/c/Windows:/cygdrive/c/Windows/System32/Wbem:/cygdrive/c/Program Files/WIDCOMM/Bluetooth Software:/cygdrive/c/Program Files/WIDCOMM/Bluetooth Software/syswow64:/cygdrive/c/Program Files (x86)/Windows Live/Shared:/cygdrive/c/Program Files/Intel/WiFi/bin:/cygdrive/c/Program Files/Common Files/Intel/WirelessCommon:/cygdrive/c/Program Files/Microsoft Windows Performance Toolkit:/cygdrive/c/Program Files (x86)/QuickTime/QTSystem:/cygdrive/c/Windows/System32/WindowsPowerShell/v1.0:/cygdrive/c/Program Files/Microsoft/Web Platform Installer:/cygdrive/c/Program Files/7-Zip:/cygdrive/d/sysinternals:/cygdrive/d/batch:/cygdrive/d/Program Files/Sublime Text 2:/cygdrive/d/RailsInstaller/Ruby1.9.3/bin:/cygdrive/d/RailsInstaller/Git/cmd:/cygdrive/d/RailsInstaller/Git/bin:/usr/bin:/cygdrive/d/batch

 18:54~
$ echo $PATHEXT
.RB;.COM;.EXE;.BAT;.CMD;.VBS;.VBE;.JS;.JSE;.WSF;.WSH;.MSC

 18:54~
$ which rails
/cygdrive/d/RailsInstaller/Ruby1.9.3/bin/rails

 18:54~
$ which rails.bat
/cygdrive/d/RailsInstaller/Ruby1.9.3/bin/rails.bat

 18:55~
$ rails -v
D:\RailsInstaller\Ruby1.9.3\bin\ruby.exe: No such file or directory -- /cygdrive/d/RailsInstaller/Ruby1.9.3/bin/rails (LoadError)

 18:55~
$ rails.bat -v
Rails 3.2.11

 18:55~
$
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    It looks like you’re using the Railsinstaller ruby binary, which is basically a redistribution of RubyInstaller with some of the essentials for Rails development bundled.

    However, everything is actually working as intended.

    Cygwin doesn’t won’t use PATHTEXT because it doesn’t need to. In other words, it will call the rails binstub instead of the rails.bat batch file. Since there is a hashbang in the binstubs, cygwin handles the entire execution itself.

    Also, the RubyInstaller distribution wasn’t compiled for Cygwin. So ruby.exe doesn’t understand the look-up of the Cygwin paths. That is why you’re getting a LoadError.

    In my opinion, you should probably check out this answer by Luis Lavena to a similar question. However, if you really want to, you can recompile Ruby in Cygwin or get a Cygwin Ruby distribution.

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