PATH and SystemRoot oddity

[Brian Dessent]

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

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