What kind of executable is zcat? Crashes from cmd.exe

[Larry Hall]

At 03:22 PM 2/12/2004, Bakken, Luke you wrote:
>> Jamshid Afshar wrote:
>> > I just installed Cygwin. What kind of executable is 
>> zcat.exe? It doesn't
>> > show up when I "dir c:\cygwin\bin\zc*" (only zcmp), but I 
>> see it's 19
>> > bytes in Explorer. It works fine within bash, but I want 
>> UNIX utilities I
>> > can use in the regular Windows Command Prompt.
>> 
>> $ ls -l zcat.exe
>> lrwxrwxrwx    1 rcampbel Users          19 Jan  6 17:06 
>> zcat.exe -> gzip.exe
>> 
>> As you can see from the ls output, it's a symbolic link 
>> (doesn't work in 
>> cmd).  You can still call gunzip -c (or whatever).
>
>I had a similar problem when trying to use gunzip from a cmd prompt
>outside of a cygwin shell - I was getting illegal ntvdm CPU errors. The
>fix is to replace the softlink with a hard link:
>
>$ cd /bin
>/bin
>$ ls -l zcat*
>lrwxrwxrwx    1 lukeb    Users          19 Sep 21 16:29 zcat.exe ->
>gzip.exe
>/bin
>$ rm zcat.exe 
>/bin
>$ ln gzip.exe zcat.exe
>/bin
>$ ls -li zcat* gzip* gunzip*
>1125899906888251 -rwxr-xr-x+   3 lukeb    Users       62976 Jul 23  2003
>gunzip.exe
>1125899906888251 -rwxr-xr-x+   3 lukeb    Users       62976 Jul 23  2003
>gzip.exe
>1125899906888251 -rwxr-xr-x+   3 lukeb    Users       62976 Jul 23  2003
>zcat.exe
>
>I would suggest doing the same with any other cygwin executable that is
>a symbolic link that you intend to use "outside" cygwin.


Sure, that's another option but one that eats up disk space if your 
partition isn't formatted for NTFS.  Replacing "ln" with "ln -s" in your
examples above will get you "Windows shortcuts" which you can use at the
command prompt directly, so long as you don't mind typing ".lnk" at the
end of each linked executable.  This assumes you haven't added 
"nowinsymlinks" to your CYGWIN environment variable of course.  This 
approach will save the disk space on non-NTFS partitions.



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