This is the mail archive of the
cygwin
mailing list for the Cygwin project.
Re: default PATH
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1
According to Christopher Faylor on 2/12/2006 9:57 AM:
>
> I don't mind protecting people against the evil 3PP which corrupt the
> PATH but, as I said, since we don't get that many complaints about the
> current behavior (which may actually have been in place for a decade) we
> don't want to necessarily penalize those smart people who have correctly
> deduced that Cygwin does a one-to-one translation to/from the windows
> path and have therefore put a ;; in their PATH expecting a translation
> to :: in the Cygwin path.
According to POSIX
(http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/basedefs/xbd_chap08.html):
"A zero-length prefix is a legacy feature that indicates the current
working directory. It appears as two adjacent colons ( "::" ), as an
initial colon preceding the rest of the list, or as a trailing colon
following the rest of the list. A strictly conforming application shall
use an actual pathname (such as .) to represent the current working
directory in PATH."
Anyone relying on ;; in %PATH% being turned into :: in $PATH is violating
the spirit of POSIX (just because :: must work does not mean that using it
is a good idea). Such users should be using ;.; turned into :.: instead.
>
> If we don't get a single person indicating that they rely on the current
> behavior then I'm ok with changing it. We have a patch ready to be
> checked in, in fact.
No complaints so far; maybe it is time to check in the patch. Just be
sure that on conversion from cygwin to win32 that '::' becomes ';.;'.
- --
Life is short - so eat dessert first!
Eric Blake ebb9@byu.net
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.1 (Cygwin)
Comment: Public key at home.comcast.net/~ericblake/eblake.gpg
Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://enigmail.mozdev.org
iD8DBQFD8Jij84KuGfSFAYARAr0hAJ48kUwEDazUM4oDTZqXThLjdOeymgCg1YX7
K0C3Tw4ky3dE01zO4hrXzQY=
=Tslh
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
--
Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html
Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html
FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/