Adding MSYS functionality to Cygwin
Warren Young
warren@etr-usa.com
Wed Jun 19 17:31:00 GMT 2013
On 6/18/2013 20:02, Christopher Faylor wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 18, 2013 at 04:04:06PM -0600, Warren Young wrote:
>> It would be possible, though somewhat evil, for Cygwin's exec()
>> implementation to peek at the DLL dependency list of a program before
>> starting it, and from that infer whether it should automatically
>> translate paths.
>
> Cygwin already does this. It detects whether the program it is about
> to run uses the Cygwin DLL and, if not, makes decisions on how to
> handle exec. It would be relatively easy to extend this.
Well, given that we're already paying the "peek" cost, I don't have any
objection to making exec() take longer for the native Windows case only.
Do you know how you want to cope with my contrived "xcopy /bin a b"
example? The point of the example, of course, is that "/bin" looks like
a real, existing POSIX path, but isn't.
From Chuck's explanation of MSYS, looks like "/b /i /n" would also get
caught in their heuristics, since it apparently doesn't do file
existence checks. (Else, Chuck's dumpbin example wouldn't need a
workaround.)
File existence checks would fix that, but would then prevent this from
doing what you want:
$ notepad ~/tmp/newfile.txt
So, it looks like MSYS is right not to try file existence checks.
(Yes, I realize you can rewrite my xcopy example using dashes for the
flags. That's beside the broader point, which is that not all things
that look like POSIX paths are such.)
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