I think you are confusing cygwin and bash.

Cygwin is used to build applications designed for unix in Windows. The resulting application is a Windows application like every other. Applications built using cygwin can launch any application, whether they were built with cygwin or not. Similarly, applications were built without using cygwin can launch any application, whether they were built with cygwin or not.

So your question might as well be

Hi there, I wish to use perl (under win xp) for calling programs that run under cygwin. I wish to use my perl scripts from dos (not from cygwin), so that commands written in perl scripts could execute programs under cygwin. Is there some nice soltion ? thanks, Fungizid

The answer varies depending on a number of conditions including

• What kind of portability do you want?
• Do you want the child to execute asynchronously or do you want to wait for it to finish before doing anything else?
• Do you want to feed data to the child's STDIN or not?
• Do you want to read from the child's STDOUT or not?
• Do you want to read from the child's STDERR or not?
• and more

Some possible answers (in no particular order):

• system
• qx//
• open '-|'
• open '|-'
• IPC::Open2
• IPC::Open3
• IPC::System::Simple
• IPC::Run
• Expect

You'll have to describe what you are trying to do.