Thanks for noting the ":" in "c:". I feel a bit foolish about not seeing that.
On the setting of the PATH. When you start cygwin from the cygwin.bat it sets the path as part of the "--login". The example I posted yesterday was much abbreviated. I started emacs with "-q --no-site-file" and then gave the minimum emacs commands to make "M-x shell" start bash. My goal was limited to finding the default coding-system, which is Coding systems for process I/O: encoding input to the process: - -- undecided-unix decoding output from the process: - -- undecided-dos This is the default coding system for both the default cmdproxy.exe and for bash as set by the three lines I posted. (setenv "COMSPEC" "/cygwin/bin/bash.exe") (setenv "SHELL" "/cygwin/bin/bash.exe") (setq shell-file-name "/cygwin/bin/bash.exe") The normal way of starting cygwin bash inside emacs would be first to set the emacs PATH inside site-start.el to include the cygwin directories.
