How to Run a Cygwin Command From Windows Scheduler (Scheduled Tasks)

June 3, 2009 at 12:42 pm · Filed under Programming

After repeated problems setting up crond to run in cygwin (it just doesn’t like the user accounts, no matter how enthusiastically I argue that I’m me), I spent some time figuring out how to run a Cygwin command as a scheduled task from Windows scheduler. Here is what I figured out.

Based on this mail archive post, I created the following cygrun.bat file:

    @echo off
    rem set HOME=c:\
    if "%DEF_PATH%"=="" set DEF_PATH=%PATH%
    set PATH=c:\cygwin\bin;%DEF_PATH%
    set myargs=%*
    if "%myargs%" == "" goto noarg
    rem echo %myargs%
    bash --rcfile %HOME%/.bashrc -i -c "%myargs%" 
    c:
    rem pause
    sleep 1
    goto exit
    :noarg
 
    rxvt -e /usr/bin/bash --login -i
 
    :exit
    exit

Then I tested the script from the command line as follows, until I had the syntax just so:

c:
cd \cygwin
cygrun.bat cygwin_script arg1 arg2

Once I was able to run it happily, I added the scheduled task as follows:

    Run: C:\WINDOWS\system32\CMD.EXE /x /c start "Some title" /min
c:\cygwin\cygrun.bat cygwin_script arg1 arg2
    Start In: c:\cygwin     <-- must be a real disk drive and path
    Run as: domain\username

Unfortunately, I was never able to figure out how to redirect stdout and stderr. I tried plenty of variations on “>> /some/path/to/log.txt 2>&1″ with no joy. Instead, I just changed all the commands in the script and added that line on to each echo statement. Sad, but functional.

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