1.5.24 unable to access files via root / (forward slash)

Brian Dessent brian@dessent.net
Tue Feb 20 13:59:00 GMT 2007


Jeff2007 wrote:

> I'm trying to access files for reading via the / directive, i.e. vi
> /usr/foo.txt
> However, this will not open foo.txt, vi creates a new file in the current
> directory instead.
> I can cd to the /usr directory and open the file with vi usr.txt. I'm using
> vi as an example, I'm actually trying to compile files with a gcc variant,
> and it can't access files the the / path either.

You have a whole mess of non-Cygwin programs in your path.  In the case
of vi, you're using:

Found: c:\WATCOM\BINNT\vi.exe
Not Found: vim

Cygwin POSIX paths only work in Cygwin programs.  You can't expect some
Watcom version of vi to know anything about them.  If you want to use vi
in Cygwin, install the Cygwin version (vim package.)

And likewise with gcc, you don't have a Cygwin version of gcc
installed.  This means you won't be able to use POSIX paths, and you
won't be compiling Cygwin binaries.

If you want consistency in your command line tools you really need to
clean up your PATH.  For one thing it looks like it contains invalid
characters:

        "C
        D:\cygwin_root\Program Files\AMD\CodeAnalyst\bin"
        "C
        D:\cygwin_root\Program Files\AMD\CodeAnalyst\"

This usually happens when you have typos like "C;D:\foo".  You need to
fix those, but in general you need to remove a bunch of the crap you
have in there, or otherwise realize that when invoking a non-Cygwin
binary you can't use Cygwin features such as POSIX paths.  Or use
cygpath to convert between them.

Brian

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