How to go to remote directory in Cygwin?

Question

I'm using the latest version of Cygwin to try to cd into a network drive on Windows XP Pro Service Pack 3. The path in Windows Explorer to this directory is something like:

\\myserver\photos\original

I tried mounting it to a drive letter ('X') in Explorer, which worked just fine, but then when I ran the command:

ls /cygdrive/x/

It just froze there and hung. Any ideas how I can go into this directory and at least taking a listing of the files in there?

Answer 1

To add to quack's answer: You can access the network drive also via

ls //myserver/photos

However, on my machine (Windows Vista) it works only after at first pointing the explorer there (\\myserver\photos) and entering my username and password.

In the Cygwin docs they lose a short word about this.

Answer 2

You're doing it correctly -- this process works on my setup. The /cygdrive/X notation should work for any drive that Windows has mounted and given a drive letter.

• Can you browse this network share in Explorer? (Your question doesn't state so explicitly, so double-check.)

• You can try a standard Windows cmd shell (not Cygwin) -- Windows' builtin pushd will auto-mount the share to a temporary drive.

  C:> pushd \\myserver\photos\original
  
  Z:\original>
  

If neither of those work, you've got another problem. (Is the computer with the network share up?)

If those work but Cygwin still can't view /cygdrive/X (or /cygdrive/z after your Windows pushd test), I'd try rebooting your workstation. If the problem persists after a reboot, you may have a broken Cygwin installation; I honestly can't think of any other reasons why it wouldn't work.

Answer 3

I had the same symptoms. The problem appeared to be related to running the application in administration mode. As soon as I turned off the option to 'Run this program as an administrator' and restarted the application I was able to access the network drives via the /cygdrive/ directory.

Note: I'm running Windows Server 2012 R2 but I would bet this would work on windows7 and up.

Note: You must open the properties dialog of the binary itself (ie mintty.exe) and not the short cut to access the administration option for the application.

Hope this helps!

Answer 4

Stumbled here with the same problem. I know this is an old post but hope it will help others just in case. I had no luck with the suggested solutions. However this worked for me: cd //remotehost/d$ if the the remote host is a Windows machine. The dollar sign does the trick.