Subject: Unusual new look to symlinks to executables
From: fergus <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked]
Cc: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 05 Apr 2005 21:15:27 +0100

This seems to have happened with today's upgrade to coreutils and
possibly with the recent upgrade to tetex. I am not certain whether
anything is broken, but I am certain that things are different.

Previously in Cygwin:

Links to executables showed the full name including the .exe extension,
as in (for example)

> ls /bin | grep csh
csh -> tcsh.exe*
tcsh.exe*

Now in Cygwin:

Some links to executables now show the executable name without the .exe
extension, as in

> ls /bin | grep csh
csh -> tcsh*
tcsh.exe*

There are now very many instances of this under /bin and possibly
elsewhere (try ls -al /bin | grep diff or ls -al /bin | grep naim). I
can see that in Cygwin an executable will run whether the instruction to
run it is given as execname.exe or just execname, so in that sense
possibly nothing is broken that once was not. However, the "many
instances" just referred to were made evident by a simple link-checking
script that I have been running for my own purposes within Cygwin for
two years or more, and in the entire Cygwin provision over that time
interval, this is the first time that the phenomenon described has
occurred. So perhaps it is accidental, and should not have happened?

Fergus

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