Launch Windows program from Cygwin

Question

Is it possible to launch a Windows program from the Cygwin Shell? (similar to firing unix commands in PHP with "exec(…)")

My example: I'd like to launch a database backup in cygwin, however the mysqldump does not exist for cygwin. Therefore I need to fallback to the Windows version (c:\xampp\mysql\bin\mysqldump …). Is it possible to launch this from within Cygwin?

Answer 1

Sure, just run it. The path is probably something like /cygdrive/c/xampp/mysql/bin/mysqldump. Just remember that any paths you pass TO mysqldump need to be in Windows (not cygwin) format. Or you can use the cygpath program to convert the paths for you.