Subject: Re: questions on bash
From: [email-masked] (Geoffrey Noer)

10 Dec 1996 03:17:43 -0800
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Original-To: [email-masked] (Ed Peschko)
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In-Reply-To: <[email-masked]> from "Ed Peschko" at Dec 9, 96 06:36:57 pm
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Ed Peschko wrote:
>
> I had a couple of bash questions (forgive me if they are FAQs, I am new to 
> this list).
> 
> Question #1:
> 
> Why doesn't the #! syntax work?

This is not a bash issue per say.  The cygwin.dll is the thing that needs
to change for this to work for things other than sh scripts.  If someone
wants to volunteer to fix it, go for it!  The relevant code is in
winsup/spawn.cc...

> Question #2:
> 
> Are the delimiters in bash 'transparent' -- ie: can you say stuff like:
> cd \source	 and	 cd /source
> and have them mean the same thing?
> 
> If not (apparently not as of release 17) I think this would be *another* 
> tremendous opportunity for portability.

The problem is that what it comes down to is that neither Unix nor Win32
were designed with compatibility with the other in mind.  Sadly, we are
often forced into making unpleasant compromises.  In the gnu-win32 tools
we want to have both compatibility with both DOS-style paths and Unix-style
paths.  Thus paths with backslashes are often different from ones with
forward slashes.  It's a feature! :-)

Text versus binary mode is another tricky one.  As a program receiving
input from a pipe, how do you figure out on the fly whether your input
stream should be interpreted in text or binary mode?  On a related topic,
we still have to go through each of the textutils and make a choice as to
they will operate.  While making this release, I first tried to change
cat.exe to operate in binary mode so you could cat the split tarfile into
one chunk like you can in Unix.  But in last-minute testing I had to back
these changes out because they broke the configure process -- generated
makefiles had control-M characters at the end of lines which screwed
everything up at build time.  *sigh*

> Question #3:
> 
> Has anyone attempted to port perl (the unix perl) to NT using gnu-win32? 
> I read in the FAQ that perl contained one file that was 'off-limits' to win32
> (aux.sh) but it gave no explanation as to why this was the case. Are there
> other problems?

Some people tried it with beta 16 and made some progress but ran into
some problems???  I'm interested in finding out if anyone makes more
progress with beta 17...

> Question #4:
> 
> what is the time frame for gnu-win32 to get out of beta?

The gnu-win32 tools as released in public releases to the net
are *not* an officially supported product by any stretch of the
imagination.  We do not guarantee that public betas will be well tested,
that we will fix bugs or answer questions, etc...  (While I try to do
these things as much as I can, doing so is not my primary job focus).
With this in mind, it is quite conceivable that the net distributions of
the gnu-win32 tools will always be in beta but this doesn't mean they
won't still be useful to people.

-- 
Geoffrey Noer
[email-masked]

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