I believe there may be a bug with /bin/start; the invocation of cmd /c should accept a single argument which is the entire command string. So the implementation: cmd //c start "$@" Should be: cmd //c "start $@" While start notepad works with both implementations, passing additional arguments to start such as /wait only works with the second implemetation. Specifically, $ start /wait notepad The current implementation returns a Windows dialog message stating that the file C:/MingGW/msys/1.0/wait cannot...