Windows 10 supports Unix sockets as reported, e.g., here https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/af_unix-comes-to-windows/
We run the tests on MobilityDB using an ephemeral instance that is created by the test suite and torn down afterwards. https://github.com/MobilityDB/MobilityDB/blob/develop/test/scripts/test.sh For this we use Unix sockets and thus the pg_ctl command is configured as follows PGCTL="${BIN_DIR}/pg_ctl -w -D ${DBDIR} -l ${WORKDIR}/log/postgres.log -o -k -o ${WORKDIR}/lock -o -h -o ''" The log file reports things are working as expected 2021-09-05 14:10:53.366 CEST [32170] LOG: starting PostgreSQL 13.3 on x86_64-pc-linux-gnu, compiled by gcc (Ubuntu 9.3.0-17ubuntu1~20.04) 9.3.0, 64-bit 2021-09-05 14:10:53.372 CEST [32170] LOG: listening on Unix socket "/home/esteban/src/MobilityDB/build/tmptest/lock/.s.PGSQL.5432" 2021-09-05 14:10:53.394 CEST [32171] LOG: database system was shut down at 2021-09-05 14:10:52 CEST 2021-09-05 14:10:53.412 CEST [32170] LOG: database system is ready to accept connections We are trying to port MobilityDB on Windows using msys2. In this case the above command does not work as reported in the corresponding log 2021-09-05 14:34:10.553 CEST [19060] LOG: starting PostgreSQL 13.4 on x86_64-w64-mingw32, compiled by gcc.exe (Rev5, Built by MSYS2 project) 10.3.0, 64-bit 2021-09-05 14:34:10.558 CEST [19060] LOG: could not translate host name "''", service "5432" to address: Unknown host 2021-09-05 14:34:10.558 CEST [19060] WARNING: could not create listen socket for "''" 2021-09-05 14:34:10.558 CEST [19060] FATAL: could not create any TCP/IP sockets 2021-09-05 14:34:10.560 CEST [19060] LOG: database system is shut down Any ideas on how to solve this ? Esteban