Incorrect command line handling when launching Cygwin program from Windows

[Andrey Repin]

Greetings, Old, Oliver!

>> NO - its entire purpose is interfacing with Cygwin and other POSIX sosftware,
>> including on other systems, from MS cmd if users insist, but according to POSIX
>> rules! We now have only limited support for some non-POSIX text files.

> I understand. The command line parsing really isn't supposed to offer an
> interface for Windows software, but rather "accidentally" works for that
> purpose in most cases. Thanks for clearing that up. I'll let my manager
> know that anything that goes wrong here is simply because we insist on
> being unreasonable (not like I didn't say that before).

> Sadly, calling Cygwin binaries from Windows software is somewhat of a
> "tradition" in our company. It's all over the place starting with our
> classic build procedure:

> 1. Fire up a batch script to unpack a Cygwin environment and launch a
>    shell script in a Bash within the unpacked Cygwin.
> 2. Shell script only really calls Make with its given arguments. I'm
>    guessing that's to ensure the path variable and other environment
>    variables are set.
> 3. The Cygwin Make instance then launches sub-Makes, but those are
>    spawned from several versions (going back all the way to 3.x) of
>    MinGW Make that are checked into version control, just like the
>    tarball of the Cygwin env.
> 4. The MinGW sub-Makes are then calling the unpacked Canadian cross-
>    toolchain hosted in Cygwin (also checked in as tarball). Notice,
>    we're building on a Windows system for a Linux target.

> It's Win32 (cmd) -> Cygwin (bash) -> Cygwin (make) -> Win32 (make)
->> (Win32 (cmd) ->) Cygwin (gcc).

> I've always wondered why they had to do quoting in their Makefiles in
> such a weird way.

> Well, here's to hoping the CMake project system + MinGW toolchains will
> be such a resounding success, it'll convince everyone here to stop
> misusing Cygwin.

If I were you, I'd first removed that hop out of Cygwin.
AFAIK, Cygwin provides a mingw cross-compiler, so there's no real need to go
out of your way.

Also, as a side-note, "unpacking" Cygwin could lead to unexpected and
hard-to-diagnoze errors due to sudden changes in DLL space layout.


-- 
With best regards,
Andrey Repin
Saturday, August 9, 2025 14:32:21

Sorry for my terrible english...