I’ve been fighting with my .screenrc file in Cygwin for quite some time… I’d configure settings and either they wouldn’t take (such as turning off startup_message) or I’d get strange errors like Unrecognized command ”.
It turns out that my .screenrc file had dos line endings acrobat xi standard download… running dos2unix fixed it!
$ dos2unix .screenrc
I post this hoping that somebody else will stumble across this when they’re struggling with similar problems. 🙂