I´ve run into a very strange problem.
Every time I run setup.exe and try to upgrade bash package
setup.exe crashes with the familiar “setup.exe has generated errors and will be close by windows. you will need to restart the program. An error log is being created”. The solution I found is for bash package but I guess it also work for other packages as well
After googling a bit I found the this mail thread . But there was no solution posted into the thread so I tried to contact the Mario Frasca (one of the participants in the mail thread) to see if he found any solution to the problem. Well, he did. He sent me a mail telling me that William Crosmun resolved his problem.
It seems that /etc/setup/bash.lst.gz became corrupted
and if you delete it
and retry the upgrade now everything should work.
UPDATE: Please make a backup of the file before deleting it. If deleting the file solve the issue then please fill a bug report at cygwin and include that file. Or post a comment here and I will try to take care of it.
Hope it helps. Remember that if your setup.exe crashes while upgrading a package other than bash you should try to delete otherpackage.lst.gz instead of bash.lst.gz.
EDIT: to find the offending package you can use for i in $(ls /etc/setup/*.gz); do gunzip -t $i; done as stated in the comments.










































29 Comments
Works for me ! Thanks a lot.
Worked for me also. Thanks for bothering to write something up about this, it saved me reinstalling Cygwin from scratch…
Cheers !
Man, I can’t express enough my gratitude ! Next step would be to open a bug against it with a corrupted bash.lst.gz attached – deleted mine too fast :)
Thanks so much – this has been bugging me for a a while and all I had to do was rm a file!
Awesome, thanks! I had this problem when cygwin setup was trying to uninstall “cygwin”. I renamed /etc/setup/cygwin.lst.gz to backup-cygwin.lst.gz and retried, and everything was fine.
You also saved me from a total reinstall of cygwin!
Thanks a a lot! Worked with my cygwin update, too.
In my case the file cygwin.lst.gz was corrupt.
Thanks loads, works like a charm!
My problem was GConf.list.gz
Wow, look at the timestamps of these posts! Looks like there is a bug in the setup program corrupting files.
Thanks again, a rebuild would have cut into my already overloaded work shedule.
i am getting an error when i try to delete this file saying:
cannot delete bash.lst it is being used by another person or program.
close any programs that might be using the file and try again.
i have closed everything and i still get this error. removing this file is stopping me from removing cygwin altogether, which i need to do because the setup won’t finish just like in the example. please help!!!
Use Unlocker http://ccollomb.free.fr/unlocker/ to find which process is using the file
Thanks a lot – this worked for me.
Same thing here. I used the following command from bash shell to find the offending files:
for i in /etc/setup/*.gz
do gunzip -t $i
done
The output should list the broken setup file (which needs to be moved/deleted).
It worked fine for me to.
Many THX!
Thanks. You saved my life. :)
Thank you very much. It worked for me too.
Thank you so much for taking time to type this up! You saved me from reinstalling Cygwin!
Thank god for this page.
Rubin, thank you
Thanks, it works!
I was trying to upgrade a bunch of packages, and it seems just deleting that one file (bash.lst.gz) solved the problem.
Thanks so much!
Another big “thank you” from over here. Now setup is running like a charm. I tried to update cygwin without success for a couple of weeks now.
solved my cygwin setup.exe crash on bash upgrade as well, thanks!
yr a legend mate. this just saved me a lot of pissing about.
Thank you. What a frustrating issue but your blog post helped tremendously!
Deleting the bash.lst.gz file solved my setup problem too. Thanks.
Thanks to you and Google, I fixed this problem in < 5 minutes. Yay Internet!
Thanks to you and Anonymous (Posted November 26, 2008 at 5:26 am) for the tip and for a way to find damaged setup files:
for i in $(ls /etc/setup/*.gz); do gunzip -t $i; done
I just wasted a whole working day on this crap. I thought MS sux! This is a reason why professionals in industry shy away from Open Source and Linux. We just don’t have the time to mess around with Kinderkrankheiten like this. It’s better to pay 5k to some vendor if his software works with a few clicks, than waste a week on this type of crap and then blow 10k in lost earnings. Plus OS software is usually hard to work with. This must be my 6th time I tried moving from Windows to linux. Yet another failure. I guess there is a reason other than dirty trix why Windows is dominant.
I feel bad that I didn’t post the solution to the mail thread in the first place, but I couldn’t figure out how. That’s why I sent it to Mario Frasca personally. Thanks, Ruben, for posting it so everyone could find it. I’m sorry to see that so many were affected, but I’m glad it helped.
Now, if anyone is having trouble getting apache to run in cygwin 1.7, I’ve gotten past that one as well (rename cygwin1.dll in your cygwin 1.5 tree. Seems the 1.7 cygserver is finding the wrong dll when it tries to start). Maybe someone can tell me how to post that solution so that others can find it…
You can always send these things directly to the cygwin mailing list. Once you post a solution to the mailing list it’s available for everybody.
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