mintty fails to start

Emember MemberUS via cygwin cygwin@cygwin.com
Thu Jan 19 15:28:00 GMT 2017


This is a minor issue and probably not typical, but could be of interest to cygwin developers/maintainers.

Problem: 
After building a 3-party cross-toolchain (unrelated to cygwin), mintty is no longer able to start.
While a few mintty windows that were still open worked ok, any NEW mintty window just flashed and immediately closed itself. 

Solution: 
Re-installation of cygwin from scratch is undesirable because current installation already has multiple customizations. 
Initial research yielded nothing - no error message, or hint of any kind, and discussion forums offered no clue either. 
The cause of the issue happened to be an empty file /bin/bash. It is currently unclear where it came from (could be a side 
effect of a build), but it is not part of standard cygwin installation. Once this empty file is deleted, mintty is able to start again. 


Suggestion: produce an error message that would help identifying this problem when mintty starts. 
NOTE: this issue happens only in cygwin, and only when both files are present: /bin/bash.exe and empty /bin/bash.
If no bash is present, mintty issues a correct error message.

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