Before starting bash, you may set some environment variables. A .bat file is provided where the most important ones are set before bash in launched. This is the safest way to launch bash initially. The .bat file is installed in the root directory that you specified during setup and pointed to in the Start Menu under the "Cygwin" option. You can edit it this file your liking. The CYGWIN variable is used to configure many global settings for the Cygwin runtime system. Initially you can leave CYGWIN unset or set it to tty (e.g. to support job control with ^Z etc...) using a syntax like this in the DOS shell, before launching bash. C:\> set CYGWIN=tty notitle glob The PATH environment variable is used by Cygwin applications as a list of directories to search for executable files to run. This environment variable is converted from Windows format (e.g. C:\WinNT\system32;C:\WinNT) to UNIX format (e.g., /WinNT/system32:/WinNT) when a Cygwin process first starts. Set it so that it contains at least the x:\cygwin\bin directory where "x:\cygwin is the "root" of your cygwin installation if you wish to use cygwin tools outside of bash. The HOME environment variable is used by many programs to determine the location of your home directory and we recommend that it be defined. This environment variable is also converted from Windows format when a Cygwin process first starts. Set it to point to your home directory before launching bash. The TERM environment variable specifies your terminal type. It is automatically set to cygwin if you have not set it to something else. The LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable is used by the Cygwin function dlopen () as a list of directories to search for .dll files to load. This environment variable is converted from Windows format to UNIX format when a Cygwin process first starts. Most Cygwin applications do not make use of the dlopen () call and do not need this variable. To set bash up so that cut and paste work properly, click on the "Properties" button of the window, then on the "Misc" tab. Make sure that "Quick Edit" is checked and "Fast Pasting" isn't. These settings will be remembered next time you run bash from that shortcut. Similarly you can set the working directory inside the "Program" tab. The entry "%HOME%" is valid. Your home directory should contain three initialization files that control the behavior of bash. They are .profile, .bashrc and .inputrc. These initialization files will only be read if HOME is defined before starting bash. .profile (other names are also valid, see the bash man page) contains bash commands. It is executed when bash is started as login shell, e.g. from the command bash --login (the provided .bat file does not set the switch). This is a useful place to define and export environment variables and bash functions that will be used by bash and the programs invoked by bash. It is a good place to redefine PATH if needed. We recommend adding a ":." to the end of PATH to also search the current working directory (contrary to DOS, the local directory is not searched by default). Also to avoid delays you should either unset MAILCHECK or define MAILPATH to point to your existing mail inbox. .bashrc is similar to .profile but is executed each time an interactive bash shell is launched. It serves to define elements that are not inherited through the environment, such as aliases. If you do not use login shells, you may want to put the contents of .profile as discussed above in this file instead. shopt -s nocaseglob will allow bash to glob filenames in a case-insensitive manner. Note that .bashrc is not called automatically for login shells. You can source it from .profile. .inputrc controls how programs using the readline library (including bash) behave. It is loaded automatically. The full details are in the readline.info. Due to a bug in the current readline version, .inputrc cannot contain \r, even on text mounted systems. Consider the following settings: # Make Bash 8bit clean set meta-flag on set convert-meta off set output-meta on # Ignore case while completing set completion-ignore-case on The first three commands allow bash to display 8-bit characters, useful for languages with accented characters. The last line makes filename completion case insensitive, which can be convenient in a Windows environment.