symbolic links to /cygdrive/X/xxx with capital letter X

[Andrey Repin]

Greetings, Arthur Norman!

> This running on Windows 10 1909 and cygwin has been updated to the latest 
> version. The effect was also visible on a freshly installed minimal cygwin 
> put on an almost fresh Windows 10 VM.

> Cygwin these days seems to have a behaviour that confuses me regarding the 
> case of a disk name:

>> ln -s "/cygdrive/c/Program Files" pf1
>> ln -s "/cygdrive/C/Program Files" pf2
>> ls -l pf*
> lrwxrwxrwx 1 acn1 None 25 Jun 12 07:37 pf1 -> /cygdrive/c/Program Files
> lrwxrwxrwx 1 acn1 None 20 Jun 12 07:37 pf2 -> /mnt/C/Program Files
>> cygpath -ma ./pf1
> C:/cygwin64/home/acn1/pf1

> You see from the above that when I use cygpath to convert from a cygwin 
> name the drive letter C: is returned in upper case. When that ends up 
> after "/cygdrive" the path behaves as I expect almost everywhere by is 
> treated specially for symbolic links. This seems to be a relatively new 
> behaviour and it bit me!

> [Use-case: I wanted to convert cygwin paths to be "very absolute" so that 
> eg my home directory is not rendered as /home/acn1 but as 
> /cygdrive/c/cygwin64/home/acn1,

cygpath is not meant to replace realpath/readlink.
And you've got exactly what you asked for.
-m returns Windows path with forward slashes.
-a returns absolute path.

> so I had a few lines of shell script to
> achieve that. I was building a package and I build both a cygwin32 and a 
> cygwin64 version, so the "very absolute" paths are portable between the 
> two worlds, both of which were important when I first set this up. Things 
> recently broke and on investigation it was because somewhere deep in 
> build scripts links to /mnt/C/... had been set up and were not usable. I 
> can of course work round the issue but being confident I have spotted all 
> cases causes me work!]

readlink -e ./pf1

man readlink


-- 
With best regards,
Andrey Repin
Friday, June 12, 2020 14:01:51

Sorry for my terrible english...