Creation of weird WINDOWS-related (sub)directories

[L A Walsh]

On 9/25/2018 9:53 AM, Hans-Bernhard Bröker wrote:
> Am 25.09.2018 um 17:16 schrieb Fergus:
> 
>> Unintentionally I have confounded the discussion. The directory named
>> "consoleX" is my home-grown Cygwin root directory.
>> (Others' preferred locationname might be "cygwin" or "mycygwin" or
>> whatever.)
> 
> That does not explain anything, actually.  Cygwin's own root directory 
> is always '/'.  The one you speak of would be the windows-side 
> installation root directory (c:\cygwin or c:\cygwin64 by default), but 
> that would never show up like that from inside cygwin.  I.e. while you 
> do have
----
	So the root of the cygwin drive is '/', so what would happen
if a cygwin program tried to expand a windows path, with a windows
variable in it, like '%SystemDrive%'....   Seems to me that
whatever that program is, it *IS* running under cygwin and using
a windows path with the win-var unexpanded. 

	If I understand correctly, the weird dir is at absolute
(from windows C:\) path:
C:/consoleX/%SystemDrive%/ProgramData/Microsoft/Windows/Caches
or, inside cygwin, you see:
/%SystemDrive%/ProgramData/Microsoft/Windows/Caches

yes?  Doesn't matter _that_ much, I'd just work
around it by moving it aside and creating a symlink in windows
from %SystemDrive% => C:\.  Hopefully whatever is creating
it won't delete the symlink.  If it does, you can retry
the command specifying /j to make a windows junction.
(in cmd.exe, you should be able to type mklink /h for help).

Note, in windows, mklink, the order is mklink <to> <from> (sorta
backwards from normal *nix conventions).

If you were curious and a bit daring, 
you could put an empty %systemdrive% directory 
there instead of the one it was using and make it read-only & set
the system attribute.  Then whatever is trying to write into
it should fail and hopefully you'll see an error message...

to set read-only and 
system with the attrib command try
attrib +r +s <filename>

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