From:	adf AT mentor-systems DOT com (Austin David France)
Subject:	Auto Path Name Conversion Suggestion
15 Oct 1998 21:18:14 -0700 :
Message-ID:	<000101bdf823$50dc2370$010120c0.cygnus.gnu-win32@menpc1>
Mime-Version:	1.0
To:	"Gnu-Win32 Mailing List (E-mail)" <gnu-win32 AT cygnus DOT com>

One for the developers:

How about a cygwin32.dll utility / extension to bash to allow environment
variables to be marked in such a way as to identify them for auto-path
conversion as happens with the PATH environment variable.  This would assist
in the running of win32 applications from within the GNU environment.

Perhaps "typeset -c varname" or a gnu utility to inform the DLL which spawns
the processes to do the mapping for specified variables.

For example, say I have a win32 program that uses the environment variable
MROOT to determine where the root directory of some data is located.
Suppose also that I use GNU scripts to manipulate the data.  I set MROOT in
my GNU environment to say /my/data, however /my is a mount point and is
physically located on c:\data which has a directory under it called "my"
which contains my data, i.e.

	/my/data -> c:\Data\My

My scripts will work fine, because they look at MROOT and find the data.  My
win32 programs fail, because /my/data is not a valid win32 path.

Why don't I set MROOT=c:/Data/My which will (currently) work in both win32
and GNU.  Unfortunatly, my root directory also has some programs under it
which I need to put into the PATH variable, for example

	PATH=$PATH:$MROOT/bin

This fails in GNU because the drive letter uses a colon separator which is
therefore treated as a separate path entry.

Assume also that I have 100+ win32 programs (which I do) that use MROOT,
wrapping a script around each program to convert the environment is not an
option, something automatic is required.

Perhaps this facility (or a suitable alternative) already exists?

Austin David France
Mentor Systems plc
mailto:adf AT mentor-systems DOT com


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