Before I report this to the cygwin developers, I wanted to be sure it was a real bug.. Please take a look at the two line 'expect_test00' script below; then search for "couldn't execute". The issue concerns running exec on a path starting with '//' (one of the "/"s is removed?). The same script works fine in cygwin tclsh see "tcl_test00" script below. Is this a cygwin expect bug or not? -- thanks, Tom cygwin bash session: --v-v------------------C-U-T---H-E-R-E-------------------------v-v-- $ export unc_date=$(cygpath -aw /usr/bin/date|sed -e 's~\\~/~g' -e "s~^\(.\):~//$COMPUTERNAME/\1\$~") $ echo $unc_date //OurWorkStn00/c$/aut/cyg/bin/date $ cat >expect_test00 <<\%%% > #!/usr/bin/expect -- > set _unc_date $env(unc_date) > set foo [exec $_unc_date] > %%% $ cat expect_test00 #!/usr/bin/expect -- set _unc_date $env(unc_date) set foo [exec $_unc_date] $ chmod +x expect_test00; ./expect_test00 couldn't execute "/OurWorkStn00/c$/aut/cyg/bin/date": no such file or directory while executing "exec $_unc_date" invoked from within "set foo [exec $_unc_date] " (file "./expect_test00" line 3) $ sed -e 's~expect --~tclsh~' expect_test00 > tcl_test00 $ chmod +x tcl_test00;./tcl_test00 $ echo 'puts "foo: $foo"' >> tcl_test00 $ cat tcl_test00 #!/usr/bin/tclsh set _unc_date $env(unc_date) set foo [exec $_unc_date] puts "foo: $foo" $ ./tcl_test00 foo: Mon Dec 10 10:46:23 CST 2007 $ uname -a CYGWIN_NT-5.1 OurWorkStn00 1.5.24(0.156/4/2) 2007-01-31 10:57 i686 Cygwin $ cygcheck -c tcltk Cygwin Package Information Package Version Status tcltk 20060202-1 OK $