The Unix launch script that come with Ant works correctly with Cygwin. You should not have any problems launching Ant form the Cygwin shell. It is important to note however, that once Ant is runing it is part of the JDK which operates as a native Windows application. The JDK is not a Cygwin executable, and it therefore has no knowledge of the Cygwin paths, etc. In particular when using the <exec> task, executable names such as "/bin/sh" will not work, even though these work from the Cygwin shell from which Ant was launched. You can use an executable name such as "sh" and rely on that command being available in the Windows path.