cygwin gdb: issue with non-posix style absolute paths

[Holger Machens]

Hello there,



when starting gdb (v10 or higher) with a windows absolute path to an 
executable, it runs into issues with paths in several cases, reporting 
the following error:

BFD: reopening /cygdrive/x/project/bin/X:\project\bin\simple.test.exe: 
No such file or directory

It looks like it does not recognize the windows path as beeing absolute 
and adds the posix-style absolute path to the current working directory 
as prefix. When using a posix-style absolute path to the executable 
instead, everything works normally.



AFFECTED USERS

This is especially an issue for developers using Eclipse CDT as reported 
here:
	https://www.eclipse.org/forums/index.php/t/1105969/
Apparently there was the same issue 13 years ago, but must have been 
fixed in the meantime and reappeared now:
	https://stackoverflow.com/questions/541099/how-to-get-eclipse-to-give-cygwins-gdb-a-posix-path-to-the-executable

I guess this commit might be a possible source of the issue on CDT side:
	https://github.com/eclipse-cdt/cdt/commit/5654112209d440469e40660c946ffdee3daa938f



FILED BUG REPORTS

CDT developers did state, that this is a bug in GDB, as you can read here:
	https://github.com/eclipse-cdt/cdt/issues/228

Consequently, the "bug" was also reported to gdb:
	https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=30017


I'm not sure, if this is the correct conclusion. Does gdb actually 
support windows? In other words - does cygwin apply patches or flags to 
gdb to get it to work with cygwin and windows paths?



Thanks in advance
  - homac