I've two Windows machines and both have bash installed. However, they differ in the way bash starts up:
Machine 1:
Typing "bash" starts the bash. Then I can type commands like ls.
Machine 2:
It seems like it starts bash and directly runs ls in it, by only typing "ls". After that it switches back to CMD automatically, like this:
Does anyone know which setting enables the behavior of machine 2? Everything looks the same for me. It's a nice feature and I want to enable it on machine 1 as well.
Bash on Ubuntu on Windows executables (binaries) cannot run from Windows applications such as cmd.exe or PowerShell.exe - Windows doesn't even see them as executable.
The likeliest explanation is that you've installed a separate Unix emulation environment such as GnuWin, which comes with native Windows binaries.
To see the location of your - by definition Windows-native - ls executable, run where ls, which will probably tell you what product it came with, such as
C:\Program Files (x86)\GnuWin32\bin\ls.EXE.
Note that the Ubuntu on Windows binaries are stored in a user-specific manner in
%LOCALAPPDATA%\lxss\rootfs\bin, but that is a moot point, given that you cannot invoke them from Windows.
In Windows 10, there is a built-in Linux subsystem (one of the greatest features of Windows 10). It gives you almost a complete Linux shell for various distributions, and you can almost do anything with it (user mode).
I bet it is installed on your first computer, and you are using that subsystem. In the latest version of this subsystem, you can run both Linux executables and Windows exe files.
I'm following the instructions of someone whose repository I cloned to my machine. I want to use the make command as part of setting up the code environment, but I'm using Windows. I searched online, but I could only find a make.exe file, a make-4.1.tar.gz file (I don't know what to do with it next) and instructions for how to download MinGW (for GNU; but after installing it I didn't find any mention of "make").
How do I use make in Windows without a GNU compiler or related packages?
make is a GNU command so the only way you can get it on Windows is installing a Windows version like the one provided by GNUWin32. Anyway, there are several options for getting that:
The most simple choice is using Chocolatey. First you need to install this package manager. Once installed you simlpy need to install make (you may need to run it in an elevated/admin command prompt) :
choco install make
Other recommended option is installing a Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL/WSL2), so you'll have a Linux distribution of your choice embedded in Windows 10 where you'll be able to install make, gccand all the tools you need to build C programs.
For older Windows versions (MS Windows 2000 / XP / 2003 / Vista / 2008 / 7 with msvcrt.dll) you can use GnuWin32.
An outdated alternative was MinGw, but the project seems to be abandoned so it's better to go for one of the previous choices.
GNU make is available on chocolatey.
Install chocolatey from here.
Then, choco install make.
Now you will be able to use Make on windows.
I've tried using it on MinGW, but it should work on CMD as well.
The accepted answer is a bad idea in general because the manually created make.exe will stick around and can potentially cause unexpected problems. It actually breaks RubyInstaller: https://github.com/oneclick/rubyinstaller2/issues/105
An alternative is installing make via Chocolatey (as pointed out by #Vasantha Ganesh K)
Another alternative is installing MSYS2 from Chocolatey and using make from C:\tools\msys64\usr\bin. If make isn't installed automatically with MSYS2 you need to install it manually via pacman -S make (as pointed out by #Thad Guidry and #Luke).
If you're using Windows 10, it is built into the Linux subsystem feature. Just launch a Bash prompt (press the Windows key, then type bash and choose "Bash on Ubuntu on Windows"), cd to the directory you want to make and type make.
FWIW, the Windows drives are found in /mnt, e.g. C:\ drive is /mnt/c in Bash.
If Bash isn't available from your start menu, here are instructions for turning on that Windows feature (64-bit Windows only):
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install-win10
Download make.exe from their official site GnuWin32
In the Download session, click
Complete package, except sources.
Follow the installation instructions.
Once finished, add the <installation directory>/bin/ to the PATH variable.
Now you will be able to use make in cmd.
Install Msys2 http://www.msys2.org
Follow installation instructions
Install make with $ pacman -S make gettext base-devel
Add C:\msys64\usr\bin\ to your path
On windows 10 or 11, you can run the command winget install GnuWin32.Make in the command line or powershell to quickly install it. Than you can use the command cmake.
There is no need to install choco anymore.
The chances are that besides GNU make, you'll also need many of the coreutils. Touch, rm, cp, sed, test, tee, echo and the like. The build system might require bash features, if for nothing else, it's popular to create temp file names from the process ID ($$$$). That won't work without bash. You can get everything with the popular POSIX emulators for Windows:
Cygwin (http://www.cygwin.org/) Probably the most popular one and the most compatible with POSIX. Has some difficulties with Windows paths and it's slow.
GNUWin (http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/) It was good and fast but now abandoned. No bash provided, but it's possible to use it from other packages.
ezwinports (https://sourceforge.net/projects/ezwinports) My current favorite. Fast and works well. There is no bash provided with it, that can be a problem for some build systems. It's possible to use make from ezwinports and bash from Cygwin or MSYS2 as a workaround.
MSYS 1.19 abandoned. Worked well but featured very old make (3.86 or so)
MSYS2 (https://www.msys2.org/) Works well, second fastest solution after ezwinports. Good quality, package manager (pacman), all tooling available. I'd recommend this one.
MinGW abandoned? There was usually MSYS 1.19 bundled with MinGW packages, that contained an old make.exe. Use mingw32-make.exe from the package, that's more up to date.
Note that you might not be able to select your environment. If the build system was created for Cygwin, it might not work in other environments without modifications (The make language is the same, but escaping, path conversion are working differently, $(realpath) fails on Windows paths, DOS bat files are started as shell scripts and many similar issues). If it's from Linux, you might need to use a real Linux or WSL.
If the compiler is running on Linux, there is no point in installing make for Windows, because you'll have to run both make and the compiler on Linux. In the same way, if the compiler is running on Windows, WSL won't help, because in that environment you can only execute Linux tools, not Windows executables. It's a bit tricky!
I could suggest a step by step approach.
Visit GNUwin
Download the Setup Program
Follow the instructions and install GNUWin. You should pay attention to the directory where your application is being installed. (You will need it later1)
Follow these instructions and add make to your environment variables. As I told you before, now it is time to know where your application was installed.
FYI: The default directory is C:\Program Files (x86)\GnuWin32\.
Now, update the PATH to include the bin directory of the newly installed program.
A typical example of what one might add to the path is: ...;C:\Program Files (x86)\GnuWin32\bin
Another alternative is if you already installed minGW and added the bin folder the to Path environment variable, you can use "mingw32-make" instead of "make".
You can also create a symlink from "make" to "mingw32-make", or copying and changing the name of the file. I would not recommend the options before, they will work until you do changes on the minGW.
I once had the same problem. But I am surprised not to find one particular solution here.
Installation from GnuWin32 or via winget are good and easy options. But I only found make 3.8.1 there. This version lacks the very important option -O, which handles the output correctly when compiling multithreaded.
choco appears to offer make 4.3, currently. So one could expect recent versions there.
But there is also the option of self compiling. And if you have to install make, which is used for compiling, this should be a valid option.
head to https://www.gnu.org/software/make/ and download a version of your liking
unpack the tar.gz files (use 7zip and unpack the file twice to retrieve the actual content)
navigate to the created directory
open command prompt in that directory
run build_w32.bat gcc This will start the compilation with the gcc compiler, which you would need to install in advance. When running build_w32.bat without any option they try to use the MSVC compiler. Sidenote: I found it surprising that gnu does not use gcc as default but MSVC :-)
ignore the warnings created during compilation. The result should still be fine
retrieve your fresh gnumake.exe from the directoy GccRel (when compiled with gcc)
put this file somewhere where you like and rename to make.exe
add the location to the system variable %PATH%
As others have noted: This manual installation might cause conflicts if you have various make versions installed by other programs as well.
You can also install scoop, then run:
scoop install make
One solution that may helpful if you want to use the command line emulator cmder. You can install the package installer chocately. First we install chocately in windows command prompt using the following line:
#"%SystemRoot%\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe" -NoProfile -InputFormat None -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Command "iex ((New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString('https://chocolatey.org/install.ps1'))" && SET "PATH=%PATH%;%ALLUSERSPROFILE%\chocolatey\bin"
refreshenv
After chocolatey is installed the choco command can be used to install make. Once installed, you will need add an alias to /cmder/config/user_aliases.cmd. The following line should be added:
make="path_to_chocolatey\chocolatey\bin\make.exe" $*
Make will then operate in the cmder environment.
Install npm
install Node
Install Make
node install make up
node install make
If above commands displays any error then install Chocolatey(choco)
Open cmd and copy and paste the below command (command copied from chocolatey URL)
#"%SystemRoot%\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe" -NoProfile -InputFormat None -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Command " [System.Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol = 3072; iex ((New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString('https://chocolatey.org/install.ps1'))" && SET "PATH=%PATH%;%ALLUSERSPROFILE%\chocolatey\bin"
I am working on Windows 7 64 bit and have a wierd problem. I installed installAnywhere(a 32 bit application) in c:\Programs(x86) since I did not want to install it in the regular "c:\Program Files(x86)" to avoid the hassles of space in directory.
When I attempted to call the installanywhere from command prompt using the syntax:
cmd /c "c:\Programs(x86)\InstallAnywhereEnterprise\build\build.exe" ...
I get the error "c:\Programs" is not a command. The reason being it is attempting to look to installAnywhere in c:\Programs ignoring the (x86) part.
I did some investigation on launching 32 bit programs vs 64 bit programs from command prompt and tried using %windir%\SysWow64\cmd.exe. When I used "%windir%\SysWow64\cmd.exe",
the %programfiles% correctly points to "c:\Programs Files(x86)" but launching the command I mentioned just gives the same error. The FileSystemRedirector of Windows still
keeps pointing to c:\Programs. I reinstalled InstallAnywhere in the default location "C:\Programs Files(x86)" but I dont know why it does not work with "C:\Programs(x86)".
Does anyone know of a workaround?
Escape the parentheses.
"C:\Programs^(x86)\..."
Why exactly are you not ok with putting it in the regular Program Files directory? Space shouldn't be an issue.
this is probably something really stupid but I can't work it out.
I upgraded my version of cucumber to v 0.10.0 and now the test's (running on Win 7) are not showing coloured output with the "pretty" formatter.
When tests are run it prints this error: *** WARNING: You must use ANSICON 1.31 or higher (http://adoxa.110mb.com/ansicon) to get coloured output on Windows
I have been to http://adoxa.110mb.com/ansicon but it's not obvious to me how I should be upgrading it. Anyone know how to upgrade my version of anscion?
One of the dev's at my work figured it out.
You need to
Download Ansicon from https://github.com/adoxa/ansicon/downloads and unzip it into a directory
with no spaces
Open a command prompt and cd to the folder where you unzipped it
Now, cd into either x86 or x64 (depending on your machine’s processor) and install it globally on
your machine (For example, D:\Cucumber\ansi160\x64)
Type ansicon.exe –i OR ansicon -i and press Enter
Any program that prints ANSI colors will now display properly on your machine.
Update as of today, http://adoxa.110mb.com/ansicon is no longer accessible.
Files have been uploaded to https://github.com/adoxa/ansicon/downloads.
I tried downloading from adoxa.3eeweb.com, but Chrome warned me that the file was "not commonly downloaded and could be dangerous."
So I opted with the file from github.
Besides that, I just followed the steps mentioned above and my output is now coloured.
I'm using SBT (Simple Build Tool) to build my Scala projects on Windows. I've seen that one of my friends, that runs OSX, gets color coded output in his terminal windows when running SBT, but mine is just the same color everywhere. Is there any way to enable this for Windows?
For DOS shell, check out ansicon
download page
type in the DOS shell:
ansicon -i
(If the above links don't work too well, aeracode mentiones in the comments this address)
(this picture is not from a sbt session but illustrates colors within a DOS session)
One way would be to install a POSIX-layer like MinGW or Cygwin and add -Djline.terminal=jline.UnixTerminal as a parameter to java to your sbt startup script.
I do not know if JLine supports colored output on Windows natively though.
I was able to get color output on windows by using Minnty with Cygwin. See the following question for the script to execute sbt from minnty
how to get specs2 color support on windows using mingw and sbt