Subject: Re: echo is wrong...
From: [email-masked] (Larry Hall)

13 Apr 1998 10:18:37 -0700
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Cc: gw32 <[email-masked]>

At 05:13 AM 4/13/98 -0700, Earnie Boyd wrote:
>---Larry Hall <[email-masked]> wrote:
><snip>
>> b19* versions of bash (2.0.1) are hardcoded to force the pipes to be
>text
>> again.  I didn't even realize this myself until Sergey pointed it out.
>> He had recompiled a version to keep pipes as binary for b18 and I
>got so 
>> used to having it that way, I forgot Cygnus would change it back
>when I upgraded to b19!  I'm building a new bash now so the world is
>right again!;-)
>> This explains why what you did works from the DOS prompt and not
>from inside
>> bash.  I guess bash should really be changed to look at the bin
>setting in
>> CYGWIN32 environment variable so that this is more configurable...
>
>Why?  Who in there right mind would want anything but binary pipe
>reads?  What purpose would text pipes give?  I can't think of any. 
>Pipes should always just pass along any data received.  They should
>never do anything with the data, including interpret a ^Z as the end
>of file.
>
>-        \\||//
>---o0O0--Earnie--0O0o----
>[email-masked]
>------ooo0O--O0ooo-------
>

I completely agree with you Earnie.  Not that I want to start up a text vs
binary war again but I've always come down on the side of using binary.
While there may be reasons why its beneficial to have "text" mode files,
its not at all clear to me that there are any benefits whatsoever to having
"text" mode pipes.  If there are some good reasons (and it might be 
interesting to hear what people think these could be), its also not clear 
to me that there are enough Win32 programs that would rely on "text" mode
pipes to warrant the pain it causes all those who attempt to use the 
Cygwin utilities.  I somehow disillusioned myself that the binary pipe 
version of bash that Sergey distributed with his updated b18 DLLs was going
to become part of the future Cygnus releases so I really had thought the 
pipe issue was "resolved".  I guess I really was disillusioned!;-)  Presuming
there is some good reason to have pipes be "text" mode in some cases, the 
only solution I can see is that we provide yet another switch.  If we're 
going to keep up this facade of allowing configurable options that seriously 
break expected functionality of these tools though, I think these 
configuration settings need to become part of the installation and the 
benefits and detriments of each option explained to the one doing the install.
Without this, we will continue to see a flood of questions to the list about 
why this and that don't work as expected.  These questions are usually easy 
to answer but the volume makes them tiresome, especially when most could be 
easily avoided by putting them up-front in the installer...

Larry Hall                              [email-masked]
RFK Partners, Inc.                      (781) 239-1053
8 Grove Street                          (781) 239-1655 - FAX
Wellesley, MA  02181                    http://www.rfk.com
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