For awhile I had issues with trying to run some docker commands using Git Bash in Windows. I would typcially have to move over to Powershell and run them to get it to work the way I expected. An example is this command to try and open a shell for a container it would give me an error.

$ docker exec -t mycontainer /bin/bash
OCI runtime exec failed: exec failed: container_linux.go:380: starting container process caused: exec: "C:/Program Files/Git/usr/bin/bash": stat C:/Program Files/Git/usr/bin/bash: no such file or directory: unknown

Another example is when it would mount the wrong directory to a container.

docker run -v /$PWD:/usr/share/nginx/html:ro -p 8000:80 nginx

Eventually I got frustrated enough to try to find out why. After a bit of searching I found out that the issue is Git Bash will attempt to convert the file path to a windows file path. This caused problems because the docker containers are Linux.

One workaround is to add an extra slash at the beginning of the path. This tells Git Bash to not convert it.

docker exec -t mycontainer //bin/bash

docker run -v //$PWD://usr/share/nginx/html:ro -p 8000:80 nginx

You can also globally disable the POSIX path conversion in Git Bash (MinGW) by setting MSYS_NO_PATHCONV=1.

I solution I ended using was to use this function in my .bashrc file to disable the POSIX path conversion just for the docker command.

# Workaround for Docker for Windows in Git Bash.
docker()
{
  (export MSYS_NO_PATHCONV=1; "docker.exe" "$@")
}

I found the solution on this Stack Overflow thread. There is also a reference to it in this Github Issue.