Strange cygpath behavior.

[Marco atzeri]

On 6/23/2011 8:06 PM, Andrey Repin wrote:
> Greetings, Marco atzeri!
>
>> On 6/23/2011 5:05 PM, Andrey Repin wrote:
>>> Greetings, Marco atzeri!
>>>
>>> Cygwin, to my best understanding, is supposed to transparently accept native
>>> Windows paths.
>
>> No, cygwin expects to receive POSIX/Unix paths
>
>> $ cygpath -h
>> [cut]
>>     -u, --unix            (default) print Unix form of NAMEs
>> (/cygdrive/c/winnt)
>
>> so cygpath -u
>> expects to receive a Windows path and convert it in a unix one.
>
> That's your assumption. Which is not necessarily true. (Unless you're author
> of cygpath, in which case you have full authority to tell me what it is
> supposed to be.)
> Man page and reference card both do not specify the exact argument format,
> only the intended result format.
> And just to be clear, windows in the core don't see a difference between the
> path in format of "C:/whatever/..." or "C:\whatever\...".
> This behavior is very, very old. Even older than Windows itself, if you know,
> what "INT 21h" means.

you are right, but it is not very useful to translate a
windows path in a windows path ...

On Win XP cmd.exe, is not always true that the
two forms are equivalent (we are not anymore on CP/M, DOS age):

C:\Temp>cd c:/Temp
The system cannot find the path specified.

C:\Temp>cd c:\Temp
C:\Temp>

C:\>cd c:\Temp
C:\Temp>

C:\>cd c:/Temp
C:\Temp>

and if I remember correctly also somewhere else in the core of MS system 
the "\" "/" are not equivalent.

>
>>    From your example:
>> cygpath -u \\\\DAEMON1\\anrdaemon\\.profile
>>    /c/DAEMON1/anrdaemon/.profile
>
>> the argument is an escaped windows network path
>> and the outcome is the Unix equivalent
>
> Not true for the "outcome" part.
>
> <stdout>:cygpath -w "/c/DAEMON1/anrdaemon/.profile"
> C:\DAEMON1\anrdaemon\.profile

With your cygdrive mapping /c is the disk C: so the first looks like a
Unix path and the outcome is the equivalent windows path.

Cygpath doesn't check if the path exist
 From my bash shell, as cygdrive is not remapped:

$ cygpath -w "/c/DAEMON1/anrdaemon/.profile"
E:\cygwin2\c\DAEMON1\anrdaemon\.profile

$ cygpath -w "/cygdrive/c/DAEMON1/anrdaemon/.profile"
C:\DAEMON1\anrdaemon\.profile


>
> Which is far from original network path.
>
>> As Corinna explained:
>> $ echo \\\\DAEMON1\\anrdaemon\\.profile
>> \\DAEMON1\anrdaemon\.profile
>
> I already said that I'm sorry, that I forgot to mention what seems to be
> critical bit of information.
>
>> By the way resetting "cygdrive" is not a good idea,
>> it is better to obtain
>
> To tell you, that was actually a good idea for me. I don't have an eternity to
> type "/cygwhatever" every time I want to address another drive. So the idea
> to map cygdrive to "/" was actually very handy, thanks to this mailing list
> helping to finish and polish it.

If you are happy, fine for me.

> --
> WBR,
>   Andrey Repin (anrdaemon@freemail.ru) 23.06.2011,<20:58>
>
> Sorry for my terrible english...
>


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