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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-18T13:07:41+00:00

Running bash commands in cygwin produce the following error: $ ls ls: command not

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Running bash commands in cygwin produce the following error:

$ ls
ls: command not found

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.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team
    1. Right click on "My Computer" -> Properties -> Advanced ->
      Environment Variables
    2. Add a new environment variable, called CYGWIN_HOME and set its value to C:\cygwin
    3. Edit the PATH environment variable and add %CYGWIN_HOME%\bin to it (usually separated by a ‘;’).
    4. 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.

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