problem invoking windows' netsh in cygwin's bash shell

Question

I have 3 computers (let me call them N1, N2, N3) with the following systems:

• N1: Windows 2019 Server Essential 64 bit, with CYGWIN_NT-10.0 -3.0.7(0.338/5/3) x86_64
• N2: Windows 10 professional 64 bit, with CYGWIN_NT-10.0 - 3.1.7(0.340/5/3) x86_64
• N3: Windows 10 professional 64 bit, with CYGWIN_NT-10.0 - 3.1.7(0.340/5/3) x86_64

Accessing them through Cygwin's SSHD from a Linux machine, I can (remotely) run on all of these 3 computers (windows-)commands like

• /c/Windows/System32/NET start <SERVICENAME>
• /c/Windows/System32/ATTRIB
• /c/Windows/System32/HELP
• /c/Windows/System32/NETSH
• ...

and they all work as expected.

Except the command NETSH on N3!

On N3, invoking

/c/Windows/System32/NETSH

does nothing at all: no error message, no command prompt, even when providing arguments like "?" (with or without quotes) or any other args, when using fully qualified command-path or command-NAME only, just nothing happens, which looks like this:

  user@machine ~ # /c/Windows/System32/NETSH
  user@machine ~ #      

(NB: on the problem machine, N3, also with a Cygwin version a little bit older than the newest (actual) one, CYGWIN_NT-10.0 - 3.1.4(0.340/5/3) x86_64, the results were the same)

Is there anyone having an idea?? Thank you!!

Schogol

question from:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/65908939/problem-invoking-windows-netsh-in-cygwins-bash-shell

Answer 1

The problem is the interaction between the Mintty and the need of netsh to be interactive and been not a Cygwin program. See for details:

https://github.com/mintty/mintty/wiki/Tips#inputoutput-interaction-with-alien-programs

If you run netsh under Cygwin using the Cygwin.bat present on you root, you have no issue as the terminal is the same of CMD

$ netsh
netsh>interface
In zukünftigen Versionen von Windows wird die Netsh-Funktionalit?t
für TCP/IP von Microsoft entfernt.
..
Unter https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=217627 finden Sie
weitere Informationen zu PowerShell-Befehlen für TCP/IP.
netsh interface>
netsh interface>quit

A workaround under Mintty is to use winpty as intermediate
https://github.com/rprichard/winpty/releases

Assuming you are using a 64bit system:

$ wget https://github.com/rprichard/winpty/releases/download/0.4.3/winpty-0.4.3-cygwin-2.8.0-x64.tar.gz
$ tar -xf winpty-0.4.3-cygwin-2.8.0-x64.tar.gz
$ cp -r  winpty-0.4.3-cygwin-2.8.0-x64/* /usr/local
$ winpty netsh
netsh>