Mail Archives: cygwin/2001/10/18/22:35:03
Here are a couple of ways to work around the problem of not being able to
type a pipe character when running bash in a DOS box under windows 95/98/Me
with a non-US keyboard.
When KEYB.COM is loaded, typing <Alt Gr>+` in a DOS box gives a pipe
character while <Shift>+\ give the broken pipe character. That's only in a
DOS box, for GUI programs these keys work the other way around.
Unfortunately <Alt Gr> doesn't seem to work for Win32 console apps in Win
95/98/Me DOS boxes.
So when you run bash in a DOS box, <Alt Gr>+` doesn't give a pipe, and
<Shift>+\ gives a broken pipe which is ignored by bash because it's a
non-ascii character. Running bash in an rxvt terminal is ok though, <Alt Gr>
gives a broken pipe (ignored), and <Shift>+\ gives a pipe.
A workaround for this would be to change the way KEYB.COM is remapping the
keyboard, putting the pipe character on <Shift>+\ where it can be got at
without using the <Alt Gr> key.
A pretty sensible way to do this would be to use XKEYB.EXE which comes with
FreeDOS instead of KEYB.COM. The keyboard map files are plain text and there
are instructions on editing them.
Alternatively, if you feel like hacking binaries you could have a go at
KEYBOARD.SYS. It turns out that this isn't easy, but the US keyboard layout
is hardcoded into KEYB.COM and is easy to spot and edit
see:
http://
groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&selm=3a59643c.4048012%40news.ozemail.com.au
How about a cygwin newsgroup?
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