strace on a2ps complains about \Device\Harddisk4\DR4

[Rasputin Paskudniak]

Greetings.

I apologize for the length of this post but I need to forestall advice 
to try what has already failed.  BTW, I have been posting this message 
to various forums without any useful results.  I'll try this newly 
discovered newsgroup server.

I have a new Windows-7 64-bit box and Cygwin (1.75) was my first 
download.  At the installation stage, I included a2ps (4.13).

My problem: When I run it, I just get back to my shell prompt. This is 
even when I run "a2ps -- version".  Mystery?

First step: What is the exit code?  echo $? displays 127. (errno.h tells 
me this is related to sockets.  Highly unlikely.)  So I decided to run 
it with strace:

$ strace -m all a2ps -- version

Well, that produced two error boxes at the Windows level.
The first had this title and message:
    [a2ps.exe - No Disk]
     There is no disk in the drive. Please insert a disk in drive
     \Device\Harddisk4\DR4
     [Cancel] [Retry] [Continue]

No matter which button I click, I get another error box with this title 
and message:

    [a2ps.exe - Application Error]
     The application was unable to start correctly. (0xc0000013)
     Click OK to close the application

Note that I got no terminal output from strace/a2ps itself - it never 
got around to executing any service calls.

Searching the Cygwin User Guide, I found some information on page 59:

     /dev/sda \device\harddisk0\partition0 (whole disk)
     /dev/sda1 \device\harddisk0\partition1 (first partition)
     ...
     /dev/sda15 \device\harddisk0\partition15 (fifteenth partition)
     /dev/sdb \device\harddisk1\partition0
     /dev/sdb1 \device\harddisk1\partition1
     [up to]
     /dev/sddx \device\harddisk127\partition0
     /dev/sddx1 \device\harddisk127\partition1
...

OK, by this convention, \device\harddisk4\partition4 would be:
/dev/sde4.  My scheme, suggested in the user guide, was to create a symlink:
$ ln -s /cyndrive/c/scratch /dev/sde4.

This has a few problems:
- The error message was about \Device\Harddis4\DR4 - differences
   in case (possibly irrelevant)
- Different device name (DR4 as opposed to partition4).
- The "file" exists:
   $ file /dev/sde
   /dev/sde4: block special
   (That running ls -l against /dev shows only directories mqueue
    and shm - none of the device files - is a subject for another
    thread.)

Trying to compile a2ps 4.14 myself gave me a compiler error after a 
loooong process. The basic error message was:
     In file included from path-concat.c:30:
     /usr/include/string.h:58: error: parse error before "void"
This involves macros defined in _ansi.h:
     _PTR     _EXFUN(mempcpy,(_PTR, const _PTR, size_t));
(I'll stop this exploration for now - it's getting too hairy.)

Other things I have tried:
- Running the Cygwin/Bash window and a2ps in administrator mode.
- Running them both in XP compatibility mode.
Same result, different try.

All this leads me to suspect that a2ps, and perhaps some other packages 
in the Cygwin family, were not actually compiled under Windows 7, 
leaving *some* fatal incompatibilities in place.

Clues? Ideas? Thoughts?

Thanks much!
-- 
+- Rasputin Paskudniak -----------------------------------+
|- In perpetual pursuit of undomesticated aquatic avians -|
+---------------------------------------------------------+


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