Subject: Re: Problem with HOME environment processing in cygwin B19
From: [email-masked] (Christopher G. Faylor)

20 Jul 1998 02:31:38 GMT
Message-ID: <[email-masked]>
References: <[email-masked]> <[email-masked]>
X-Newsreader: trn 4.0-test63 (15 March 1998)

In article <[email-masked]>,
Christopher G. Faylor <[email-masked]> wrote:
>In article <[email-masked]>,
>Lincoln Baxter <[email-masked]> wrote:
>>
>>We have finally figured out the problem I reported several months ago
>>with running dos exe's which use a
>>HOME environment which broke between cygwin b18 and b19;
>>
>>The problem is that I have to 'fixup' $HOME so that it has diskCOLON
>>as in 'd:/path/to/home' (instead of just '/path/to/home'),
>>so that it can be correcttly interpreted by my scripts the are run
>>with $HOME as an argument  (but are not linked with cygwin.dll such as
>>the activeware port
>>of perl).   This colon is interpreted by the 19 and 19.1 dll as a PATH
>>separator, even in the HOME EV.   Thus
>>a HOME EV defined as 'd:/home/lincoln'  will be converted as
>>d;d\home\lincoln in the exec'ed command.   B18 did not do this..
>>
>>We have narrowed this down to the dosity routine in the cygwin19 dll
>>which is called for BOTH HOME and PATH.  This is no problem
>>for PATH, but is a BIG problem for HOME which can only be one path.
>>
>>Is is possible that HOME could be treated, specially such that if it
>>contains a COLON, all the dll does
>>is flip the /'s for \'s?   Otherwise existing processing is will work.
>>It would be really nice if this were fixed in the
>>the upcoming 19.2 release, It would provide compatiblilty with the
>>behavior, of b18 AND make b19 actually
>>usable in a mixed, dos/bash environment.  As it stands b18 is much
>>more useable because it gets this right..
>>I would fix this myself as submit a fix, but we are unable to get
>>cygwin19 to build.
>
>This will be fixed in the next version of cygwin.

By the way, it just occurred to me  that if you used some other environment
variable besides HOME for this, you wouldn't have this problem.  Why not
just set a "DOSHOME" environment variable?
-- 
[email-masked]             "Everything has a boolean value, if you stand
http://www.cygnus.com/      far enough away from it."  -- Galena Alyson Canada