No shell can be opened: Error: Could not fork child process: There arre no available terminals

[Stefan Berger]

Sorry, for the noise. I had not seen the previous messages where this was already reported.
The bit that I can add to this discussion now is that updating to Cygwin (the 'cygwin package') 3.6.3-1 just now did resolve the issue for me and playing with the individual app exploit security settings doesn't help...

Regards,
Stefan

________________________________
From: Cygwin <cygwin-bounces~stefanb=us.ibm.com@cygwin.com> on behalf of Stefan Berger via Cygwin <cygwin@cygwin.com>
Sent: Monday, June 9, 2025 11:10 AM
To: cygwin@cygwin.com <cygwin@cygwin.com>
Subject: [EXTERNAL] No shell can be opened: Error: Could not fork child process: There arre no available terminals

Hello!

  It looks like a recent update of cygwin is now not letting me open any shell anymore. I get the following error with the Window frame showing 'nologin' in upper left corner:

Error: Could not fork child process: There are no available terminals (-1).

I have tried to apply security exceptions for nologin and mintty via Windows settings.

The Windows settings I have used can be found under 'Privacy & security' -> 'Windows Security' -> 'App & browser control' -> 'Exploit protection settings' -> 'Program Settings'. I added 'C:\cygwin64\sbin\nologin.exec' with its full path and added 6 overrides so that everything is now 'off'. I did the same for bash and mintty  but it does not resolve the problem. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
   Stefan





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