Cygwin gawk doesn't pipe when called explicitly

Question

That's the best description I can think of, apologies if it's a little esoteric.

I have cygwin installed on Win 10, Build 16299 but it's installed with the non-administrator option; there is no option to install as admin on this PC.

When executing the following line, it runs when gawk is found using the PATH but not when I explicitly tell it where to find the executable. Any suggestions?

gawk "BEGIN { print \"echo Hello mum\" | \"./cygwin/sh\" }"
Hello mum

.\cygwin\gawk "BEGIN { print \"echo Hello mum\" | \"./cygwin/sh\" }"
gawk: cmd. line:1: fatal: can't open pipe `./cygwin/sh' for output (No such file or directory)

The cygwin directory is a subset of cygwin commands along with all the dlls copied from \cygwin64\bin\

Answer 1

Suppose You run the command from the directory `/home/user'.

When You run gawk then $CWD (current working directory) is set to /home/user.

When You run .\cygwin\gawk then $CWD is set to /home/user/cygwin. In this case ./cygwin/sh points to /home/user/cygwin/cygwin.

Let's try this:

.\cygwin\gawk "BEGIN { print \"echo Hello mum\" | \"./sh\" }"