[h-e-w] The bash shell from Emacs

[gerald . jean]

Hello,

I have installed Emacs-21.3, thanks to all who have reminded me that I
needed to set the environment variable "HOME" and locate my .emacs there in
order for emacs to find it, and the bash shell from Cygwin.  Starting bash
outside of Emacs yields the usual results, I can use it no problems.  When
I start bash from Emacs through the "shell" command a shell buffer is
opened and I get the bash prompt BUT bash doesn't recognize any command.

bash-2.05b$ ls
: command not found
bash-2.05b$ pwd
: command not found
bash-2.05b$ exit
: command not found
bash-2.05b$

Yes I have the cygwin/ bin in my PATH.

Thanks for any insights,

Gérald Jean