The Cygwin User Guide on path names

Linda Walsh cygwin@tlinx.org
Thu Aug 25 17:54:00 GMT 2016


Andrey Repin wrote:
> Greetings, Ken Brown!
> 
>> The documentation also says, "The usage of Win32 paths, though possible,
>> is deprecated...."  I wonder if this should be strengthened to say 
>> something like, "The usage of Win32 paths, though possible, is strongly 
>> deprecated and may be removed in a future release of Cygwin."
> 
> That would be the day Cygwin die for me.
> -- 
> With best regards, Andrey Repin
> Wednesday, August 24, 2016 12:50:55
> Sorry for my terrible english...
---

Curious -- but why?  How do you make use of win32 pathnames
( "C:\bin" versus "/bin" or "/c/bin" or "/cygdrive/c/bin" )
depending on how your cygwin is configured).

I'm wondering if maybe there is a misunderstanding?

For the most part -- many cygwin apps may not work 
correctly if given a win32 path in the same place you'd
put a *nix path due to the backslashes being turned into
quote sequences.  I mean, you can't type:

> ls C:\bin 
  (instead of )
> ls /c/bin

and have it work, since the first would
turn into: "ls C:bin" (or if the \b is taken
as an escape sequence, it rings the bell, so it
could be translated as "ls C:\008in".  So I'm wondering
where you know the backslash form would always work and
wouldn't be mangled "somewhere"...?  (If you see what
I mean?)

*cheers*
-linda



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