Beginnings of a patch: /etc/hosts

Warren Young warren@etr-usa.com
Thu Sep 12 10:08:00 GMT 2002


Nicholas Wourms wrote:
>>>Brilliant to see so much progress on this!
>>>Are you sure that "CYGWIN_9*)" correctly catches Windows ME?
>>
>>No, I'm not.  I'm incorporating Warren Young's suggestion.  Unless
>>someone
>>with ME can confirm that 'uname -s' returns CYGWIN_9*?  Nicholas?
> 
> Nope, it returns "CYGWIN_ME-4.90"

Okay, two possibilities now.

One is to add a special case for ME.  It occurs to me that this is 
somewhat brittle -- who's to say this won't break again when yet another 
flavor of Windows comes out?  (<rhetoric>Why, Microsoft, oh why, are 
version numbers so offensive in thy sight?</rhetoric>)

The other is to go with my environment variable approach.  I'm pretty 
sure SYSTEMROOT is automatically defined on NT; it can be removed by a 
determined user, of course.  Can anyone make such a claim for WINDIR on 
9x type systems?  The variable exists on the Win98 box in my office.

I agree with the previous posts about letting people monkey-wrench the 
system if they're determined to, for what that's worth.  I think that 
the protection of checking that the directory name we come up with 
exists is sufficient protection -- if it exists, assume that it's the 
correct directory.  If it's not a directory, then we can safely assume 
that something's hosed and refuse to make the symlinks.


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