Re: PATH and SystemRoot oddity

[Larry Hall <lh-no-personal-replies-please at cygwin dot com>]

At 03:14 PM 11/26/2004, you wrote:
>Brian Dessent wrote:
>>Luke Kendall wrote:
>>
>>>I see that by default PATH includes some entries like
>>>%SystemRoot%/System32
>>>
>>>I also note that $SystemRoot is undefined, yet $SYSTEMROOT contains the
>>>expected C:\WINDOWS value.
>>>
>>>This of course causes problems.  Would a backslash-style path work
>>>correctly if it were properly interpolated into the PATH?  Is the %
>>>notation special magic for Cygwin to handle DOS-isms?
>>>
>>>The case variance may be of interest, in that case.
>>
>>I think you're falsely attributing your errors to this.  The cygwin DLL
>>takes care of all the win32 -> posix translation of the path, and it
>>knows about %SystemRoot%.  If this were really the case don't you think
>>tons of things would break?  Try "echo $PATH" at your shell prompt and
>>you'll see that the systemroot is correctly substituted.
>>FWIW, I think environment variables are case-insensitive at the win32
>>API level.  They preserve case but are not sensitive to it, just like
>>ntfs.
>>Brian
>
>I have a similar question: I had to modify 'profile' to change
>  $PATH=xxxx:$PATH
>to
>  $PATH=xxxx
>
>How can I simply add $SYSTEMROOT:$SYSTEMROOT/system32 to this? It doesn't work as-is because $SYSTEMROOT = C:\Windows (and this is therefore not interpreted by the path). Rephrasing, what do I use to translate "C:\WINDOWS" to "/cygdrive/c/windows"?
>
>I had to do this because some nasty things in my path were causing problems (e.g. ClearQuest/ClearCase)


I'll state one obvious option - just add "/cygdrive/c/windows", etc. in your
'profile'.  If you want Cygwin to do the translation for you, change the path
in 'cygwin.bat' (or whatever your startup link is) instead.



--
Larry Hall                              http://www.rfk.com
RFK Partners, Inc.                      (508) 893-9779 - RFK Office
838 Washington Street                   (508) 893-9889 - FAX
Holliston, MA 01746                     


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