Open Cygwin Bash Shell Here

16 May 2009

cygwin-prompt-here-3

If you’re like me, you love shortcuts and other tools that improve productivity. One of the other things I’ve gained a liking for is the Bash shell, after spending time in a Unix environment. Since I couldn’t live without this, and the other tools that typically come with a Unix environment, I installed the great Cygwin, in order to create a Linux-like environment on my Windows PC. (Not ready to make the full jump to Linux yet, for gaming reasons)

However, one thing that always irked me was having to manually navigate to a certain folder after opening up a Bash shell in Cygwin. For Windows, there is a PowerToy called “Open Command Window Here”, that provides a context menu option for quickly opening a (Windows) command prompt with the location set to the selected folder. This is helpful, since you often have the folder open when you want to also have a command prompt at the same location. Now, all I needed was the equivalent function, but for the Cygwin Bash shell, instead of the Windows Command prompt.

Creating a “Bash Prompt Here” shortcut

I did some searching and found a myriad of solutions to my problem, most of which were somewhat complicated. Thankfully, I did find one link that suggested an easier solution.

Basically, here’s what you do. When you install Cygwin (of if you’ve already installed it, download it again and start setup again to run an update), make sure that you select the chere package under the “Shells” category.

cygwin-prompt-here-1

After Cygwin is launched, open it up and type the command chere -i, like so:

cygwin-prompt-here-2

You should now see the following option in your folder’s context menu, and more importantly, it works!

cygwin-prompt-here-3

Hope you found this helpful!

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25 Comments »

  1. 1. Alistair said on August 7th, 2009 at 2:54 am #

    Great tip – thanks

  2. 2. Enzo said on August 14th, 2009 at 3:52 am #

    Error (5): Access is denied.

    /usr/bin/chere Error: Hive not writable
    /usr/bin/chere: Aborting.

    This is the response I get, whats up?

    My working directory is
    /cygdrive/c/Users/Me

  3. 3. dnorgaard said on November 4th, 2009 at 10:44 am #

    Hi Enzo

    I had the same problem. However, if you run Cygwin bash shell as admin you will have sufficient permissions to add the shell extension.

    Cheers
    Dennis

  4. 4. david said on March 7th, 2010 at 6:29 pm #

    Thanks peter! Works fine in windows 7 64bit

  5. 5. Carlos Martinez said on March 8th, 2010 at 6:10 am #

    Possibly the best thing I’ve seen this year! Good solid random geekery. Nice one.

  6. 6. seth said on March 24th, 2010 at 12:57 pm #

    Thanks Peter! I just installed Cygwin and was searching for “Bash prompt here” and had forgotten how I had done it before. Great post!

  7. 7. Anon said on June 24th, 2010 at 1:00 am #

    Awesome, thanks!

  8. 8. Shaun Abram » Blog Archive » OSCON Day1: The Productive Programmer said on July 22nd, 2010 at 10:09 pm #

    […] Cygwin: bash here […]

  9. 9. Jon said on April 28th, 2011 at 10:03 pm #

    Elaborating on what dnorgaard said, you can hold down Ctrl+Shift (Windows 7) while clicking on a program icon in order to run it as an adminstrator. This fixed the “hive not writable” error for me.

  10. 10. puakv said on May 23rd, 2011 at 10:51 pm #

    First up, awesome!!! thanks for that tip.

    From cygwin home dir, is there a way to setup a batch file with predefined locations so that I can get to where I need simply by launching that file?

    something like a .bat file equivalent of windows

  11. 11. Girisha Puttaswamy said on June 24th, 2011 at 1:19 am #

    Awesome. Thanks.

  12. 12. Shantanu Gadgil said on August 23rd, 2011 at 11:06 pm #

    Hi,
    Nice tip. I use the ‘mintty’ terminal rather than the default.

    $> chere -i -t mintty

    Obviously, the package “mintty” needs to be installed as well! ๐Ÿ™‚

  13. 13. Zohair said on October 19th, 2011 at 12:49 am #

    @puakv: You can use symbolic links.

    $> ln -s

    so for example if you want to link to /cygdrive/d/work/project001 do this

    $> ln -s /cygdrive/d/work/project001

    Some more info: http://www.nixtutor.com/freebsd/understanding-symbolic-links/ and of course there is always the man file ๐Ÿ™‚

  14. 14. Zohair said on October 19th, 2011 at 12:50 am #

    hmmm my syntax lines got mis-printed. http://unitstep.net/blog/2009/05/16/open-cygwin-bash-shell-here/comment-page-1/#comment-284146

    The first $> line should read

    $> ln -s (target_dir) (optional_name)

  15. 15. rana said on August 28th, 2012 at 10:29 pm #

    thanks, very much, it worked well

  16. 16. Steve said on January 4th, 2013 at 3:39 pm #

    Thank you, saved me a lot of frustration.

  17. 17. Zantier said on January 8th, 2013 at 6:23 am #

    Thanks. And thanks Shantanu for

    $> chere -i -t mintty

    I didn’t know it was using mintty (or even what mintty is), but I really like how it handles resizing the window.

  18. 18. How do I create a shortcut that opens Cygwin bash shell on a directory of my choosing (UNC especially)? said on February 14th, 2013 at 12:04 am #

    […] may also be interested in chere a context menu entry for Open bash […]

  19. 19. Eugene said on March 22nd, 2013 at 5:18 am #

    Very helpful post, Mr Peter! ๐Ÿ™‚ Straight and to the point.

    Windows 7 x64 (Russian) — works very well.

  20. 20. Jerry said on April 1st, 2013 at 9:30 pm #

    Hmm I tried this, installed the required package, ran the command (with cygwin in admin mode), it executed without error, however cygwin does not appear in my context menus ๐Ÿ™
    PS. Windows 8.

  21. 21. William said on April 29th, 2013 at 4:51 pm #

    Jerry I have the same problem.

    Ran:

    $ chere -i -t mintty

    Without a problem but nothing changes in explorer. Running Win7 x64

  22. 22. Mike said on May 27th, 2013 at 10:58 am #

    Thanks for this great tip! I’ve recently been forced at work to use a Win 7 PC instead of my trusty Linux Mint box and I’ve been missing my command line functions. This restores some of the convenience.

  23. 23. Jitendra Vyas said on November 9th, 2013 at 9:21 am #

    When I run chere -i i get this

    JitendraVyas :: ~ ยป chere -i
    Shell defaulting to zsh defined for Jitendra Vyas
    Error (5): Access is denied.

    /usr/bin/chere Error: Hive not writable
    /usr/bin/chere: Aborting.
    JitendraVyas :: ~ ยป

  24. 24. chrdou said on November 12th, 2013 at 10:48 am #

    FYI, chere package is not available in cygwin 64 bits (http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2013-10/msg00359.html)

  25. 25. umer936 said on November 25th, 2013 at 2:26 pm #

    If chere doesn’t appear in your list, you can use the script I made to do this.

    http://github.com/umer936/CygwinHere

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