"cmd: command not found" from "start" command (open directory in Windows Explorer) in git bash?

Question

Why show the directory in explorer command does not work in git bash? Here is what I am typing:

Solution 1

Even though it shouldn't be necessary, try the following:

/c/Windows/System32/cmd.exe //c 'start .'

start is a command that is internal to cmd.exe, so it must be invoked with cmd /c (and Git Bash apparently requires doubling / chars. to be recognized as cmd-style option-prefix characters).

However, there is a shell-script wrapper for it - /usr/bin/start - which does this for you.

In your case, this shell script unexpectedly complains about not finding cmd, even though /c/WINDOWS/system32 should be in your $PATH environment variable by default - do check that variable and see if it's being modified unexpectedly somewhere.

$PATH is initially defined in /etc/profile, but can be overridden / modified in ~/.bash_profile, for instance.

/etc/profile also contains helpful links in comments:

# Some resources...
# Customizing Your Shell: http://www.dsl.org/cookbook/cookbook_5.html#SEC69
# Consistent BackSpace and Delete Configuration:
#   http://www.ibb.net/~anne/keyboard.html
# The Linux Documentation Project: http://www.tldp.org/
# The Linux Cookbook: http://www.tldp.org/LDP/linuxcookbook/html/
# Greg's Wiki http://mywiki.wooledge.org/

Solution 2

I had a similar problem because my path had %SystemRoot%\system32 included. It turns out that the env variable %SystemRoot% is not statically defined, but automatically included in the environment when starting cmd.exe or power shell. Since MINGW64's bash is neither, it just saw %SystemRoot%/system32 and could not traverse that to find cmd.exe.

Changing path to use C:\Windows\System32 cured this.