Why does CYGWIN double the backslash in execvp()?

Peter Rosin peda@lysator.liu.se
Thu Feb 26 22:34:00 GMT 2015


On 2015-02-26 21:59, A L wrote:
> Hi,
> Yesterday I asked about the double slash, but my question has got no
> attention (despite some other activity
> on the list).  I deem the behavior as a bug.  To make things more
> evident (that it's a bug) one can replace "DIR"
> with "ECHO" in the code I posted, and compare the outputs with and
> without BUG defined... I'd really appreciate
> if someone could take a look at it, or explain me why my expectations
> were wrong.

When you say

	"/cygdrive/c/windows/system32/cmd.exe"

you tell Cygwin that you want posix semantics. Which you don't.

Try

	"c:/windows/system32/cmd.exe"

or split arg 2 into two args: "DIR" and "C:\\", like so:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <unistd.h>

#define NOBUG

int main()
{
  const char* args[5];
  char** xargs;
  args[0] = "/cygdrive/c/Windows/System32/cmd.exe";
  args[1] = "/c";
  args[2] = "DIR";
#ifdef NOBUG
  args[3] = "C:\\";
#else
  args[3] = "C:\\.";
#endif
  args[4] = 0;
  printf("Command = \"%s %s %s %s\"\n", args[0], args[1], args[2], args[3]);
  xargs = (char**) &args;
  execvp(args[0], xargs);
  return 0;
}

I think that cmd.exe has a non-standard grasp of how command lines
should be handled and Cygwin cannot make exceptions for individual
applications, that would be a never-ending maze.

Cheers,
Peter


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