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I'm trying to run the following from my bash script. (bash installed via msysgit)

taskkill /IM ssh-agent.exe

The output I get on the screen from taskkill is:

ERROR: Invalid argument/option - 'C:/Program Files/Git/IM'.
Type "TASKKILL /?" for usage.

The executible is running, but the /IM is being expanded regardless of what I try to do to escape it...

I've tried using \/IM but then it sends \/IM without escaping the slash, I've tried a few different ways of running it through eval, cmd /c start, etc... but they all seem to have issues. I've also tried set -o noglob, which also didn't work. neither did $'\057/'IM or similar attempts...

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  • Maybe try .\SomeExecutable.exe "/foo" Commented Jan 7, 2016 at 4:54
  • @l'L'l SomeExecutable is running fine, it's the fact that the parameter coming into SomeExecutable is /some/path/to/foo instead of just /foo Commented Jan 7, 2016 at 4:58
  • Oh I see... escaping it seems logical as you had; my only other suggestion might be to try it in quotes. Commented Jan 7, 2016 at 5:04

2 Answers 2

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46

Since my comment actually provided the answer, I'll post it.

How about escaping a forward slash to another forward slash like //. It works for me when I execute this command where I escaped the /r parameter: start C:/folder/beep 2000 250 100 //r 3

Source: http://oldwiki.mingw.org/index.php/switches%20with%20forward%20slashes

Minimalist GNU for Windows

Passing switches with forward slashes under MSYS

In MSYS a command line argument of "/c" is interpreted as the C: drive, so to pass any argument beginning with a forward slash you need to use two forward slashes. For example, to use this command in MSYS:

cmd /c echo foo

Use:

cmd //c echo foo

If you need to have the windows-style of a path in a shell script, you can do

x=$(cd /unix/path && cmd //c cd)

The x var now contains the windows equivalent path to /unix/path

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3 Comments

The trick for converting unix path to windows path in a variable is very useful. However, you should be aware that if /unix/path is a symblink, e.g. created by mklink /j c:\unix\path d:\unix\path, your variable will show the linked location d:\unix\path
@sveinbr: Thank god msys2 comes with cygpath again, eh? I remember being thoroughly frustrated at some version of msys whose maintainers had left cygpath out, apparently just because "You should not need such a thingy, because Msys automagically translates Path names, even in the environment.".
However, if we are running a huge bash script in MinGW, we cannot modify the script to make it working with mingw syntax...
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After hours of looking for various searches like "disable bash file expansion" and the like, I found it by searching specifically for "bash" "windows" taskkill the executable I was trying to run, I came across this answer, which finally worked for me.

cmd " /c taskkill /F /IM ssh-agent.exe"
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2 Comments

Can't you simply escape the forward slash with another forward slash like //? It seems to work for me, source: oldwiki.mingw.org/index.php/switches%20with%20forward%20slashes
@M.Mimpen thanks so much, that actually works for me too... I'd tried \/ and can't think of how many other permutations to try and get bash to not use path completion. I was trying to make my windows start-ssh-agent match the cmd based one...

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