How to open an SSH session to Windows directly in Bash instead of the Windows command prompt?

Question

I’m trying to open an SSH session to a Windows 7 machine. When I SSH from Mac’s terminal, I am looking for the Bash prompt, but the session opens in a Windows command prompt: C:\Windows\system32>.

I’ve installed Cygwin (with OpenSSH) on Windows and the opensshd is running. I know we can run the Cygwin.bat to launch the shell after SSH’ing, but is there a direct way? Do I need to set any other environment variable to directly open a Bash shell instead of the command prompt?

I tried to search around, but I could not find a direct answer. Or maybe I am missing something obvious?

Answer 1

Install Freesshd from freesshd.com and save it. Then launch it as a service. Go to service in the bottom right of your computer where it shows up as FreeSSHD service. Click on FreeSSHD service. Go to SSH tab. change the path to the login shell to your '/usr/bin/bash ' path where cygwin is installed.