/WINDOWS

[Igor Pechtchanski]

On Mon, 8 Dec 2003, Morrison, John wrote:

> Igor Pechtchanski wrote:
> > On Mon, 8 Dec 2003, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
> >
> >> Hi,
> >>
> >> There are a bunch of applications, which, for security reasons, want
> >> to set $PATH to a fixed value.  This approach is a bit tricky on
> >> Windows, since the needed paths to the Windows system directories
> >> are not fixed values as it's on POSIX systems.  A lot of
> >> applications are falling back to values like _PATH_DEFPATH or
> >> _PATH_STDPATH and use them to set $PATH before starting another
> >> application.  Sshd, login, cron are just three of them.  The current
> >> patches to all three applications are so that the code which sets
> >> $PATH before exec'ing another process is not executed when built for
> >> Cygwin.
> >>
> >> I think a better approach is this:  Let's generalize the idea of a
> >> fixed path to the Windows system directories.  I suggest, that one
> >> of the base install scripts creates a symlink "/WINDOWS" like this:
> >>
> >>   ln -s `cygpath -m "$WINDIR"` /WINDOWS
> >>
> >> This allows to keep the above described code to set $PATH in the
> >> affected tools, just by redefining, say _PATH_DEFPATH like this:
> >>
> >> #ifdef _PATH_DEFPATH
> >> #undef _PATH_DEFPATH
> >> #define _PATH_DEFPATH "/usr/bin:/bin:/WINDOWS/system32:/WINDOWS:/WINDOWS/COMMAND/WINDOWS/system32/Wbem"
> >> #endif
> >>
> >> which contains both, NT and 9x paths.  We could perhaps even change
> >> /usr/include/paths.h to reflect this, at one point.
> >>
> >> Opinions?
> >> Corinna
> >
> > FWIW, I agree that it's a good idea to have a fixed pointer to the
> > windows directory, but I don't think "/" is the right place to have
> > it.  Could we make it "/mnt/WINDOWS" or "/opt/WINDOWS" or something?
> > I don't like cluttering up the root directory unnecessarily...
>
> I like the /mnt idea :)
> I'd also like it to have /cygdrive/[insert drive letter here]/
> as /mnt/[insert drive letter here]/ too (possibly instead of?)
>
> J.
>
> PS, I know I can change what /cygdrive is refered to as.

That's what I use on my machine:

$ mount
[snip]
c: on /mnt/c type user (binmode)

HTH,
	Igor
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