matveyt / shebang

A small helper for MSYS2/Cygwin that allows direct execution of shell scripts by Windows applications.

shebang

Summary

An utility for MSYS2/Cygwin which allows to execute POSIX shell scripts transparently.

Description

MSYS comes with its own port of bash which is able to execute shell scripts. However, unlike ported binaries, no POSIX shell script can be executed directly from the native Windows command-line interpretator cmd (or from other Windows programs, such as FAR, etc.).

It's quite easy to come up with the "wrapper script" solution, for example:

@rem shebang.cmd
@env MSYSTEM=MINGW64 %~n0 %*

will execute any POSIX script (or native binary) called "shebang" found on PATH. However, any (incorrectly ported) application will fail if it tries to execute such script by spawning it directly, which is normal for the POSIX world, but not for Windows, where one needs to provide an explicit command, such as cmd /C shebang.cmd. This is where shebang comes to help.

Building

Shebang was successfully built and tested with GCC/MSYS2 10.2.0.

There is a meson project script provided with the distribution. You will need meson, python3 and ninja to make use of it.

However, shebang could be also compiled in the command line. For example, gcc -s shebang.c -o shebang.exe -lshlwapi works just nice.

The additional DEFINEs to control the building process are:

-DUNICODE
-DNOSTDLIB

UNICODE is needed to build the "wide" version of an executable.

NOSTDLIB is useful for reducing the size of an executable by linking it with a custom startup code, such as nocrt0.

Using

Simply rename or symlink shebang, so its name matches the script you want and put it on PATH. Now upon execution shebang will find the script on PATH, parse its first (aka "shebang") line, and execute it with own command-line arguments.

shebang's Issues

meson project script missing

Can not find a meson project script (meson.build) file.
How to compile shebang with meson?

How to control the returned file path from shebang tool

Hi, first, this project is quite nice, thanks for your work!

I have one issue when I try to use this tool to generate wxWidgets' build options, see my post here:

The shebang command to run the bash script under Windows CMD

One issue is that under Windows, I would like the return path has normal Windows style, such as:

-IF:/msys2/mingw64/lib/wx/include/msw-unicode-3.1

In my post in the Code::Blocks forum.

Any ideas?

Thanks.