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Re: cp.exe bug


Ross Boulet wrote:

[...]

Above is the makefile which produced the error.  The cause seems to be cp's
handling of a .exe file.  A simple way to get what I now see as a misleading
error message from cp is:

$ touch foo.exe
$ cp foo bar # note the absence of the .exe extension
cp: `foo' and `bar' are the same file


This problem still exists in the coreutils-5.2.0-1 package that I have recently posted on cygwin-apps.

Alan's issue arose from the fact that his makefile used a symbol for the
resulting executable and gcc naturally appends the .exe in the cygwin
environment.  When he tries to use the symbol in his cp command, the .exe is
not there and cp gives the 'same file' error message.  I did some googling
and found this issue has been mentioned in several threads.  From what I can
gather, at least one iteration of fileutils would allow making a copy of a
.exe file without using the extension, as long as another file with the same
basename and no .exe extension did not exist.

It looks like there was some code in fileutils 4.1-1 to handle .exe copies
like this, but the code was removed from the released cp in fileutils 4.1-2.


I've been looking at the fileutils-4.1-1 and fileutils-4.1-2 source code and AFAICT there has been some .exe handling code ripped out between these versions. I assume it was problematic but I haven't been able to dig up a bug report that explains why it was taken out.

http://www.cygwin.com/ml/cygwin-announce/2001/msg00081.html

http://www.cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2003-04/msg00017.html




Mark Blackburn

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