Running Hadoop and Friends under windows.

This is from a post on the hbase mailing list:

The key piece is that you must have a cygwin installation on the machine, and include the cygwin installation's bin directory in your windows system PATH environment variable. (Control Panel|System|Advanced|Environment Variables|System variables|Path
There is always a constant confusion between the paths on the windows side (as seen by the jvm) and by the paths seen by the hadoop scripts through cygwin.

You have to run the hadoop scripts from the cygwin bash shell and in that context the paths you pass as arguments are seen as cygwin paths, but the jvm deals with them as windows paths.

I found it much simpler to run the scripts from the directory that contained the java processes launched by the scripts needed than to try to work out the paths.