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Date: Wed, 9 Jun 2010 15:15:54 +1200
Message-ID: <AANLkTikNdkdkRb8dKLa_aLhqQfnQ3enHhRqsLfn3cvIJ@mail.gmail.com>
Subject: Re: 'cp' utility bug when <dest-name>.exe file exist.
From: David Antliff <david.antliff@gmail.com>
To: cygwin@cygwin.com
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On Wed, Jun 9, 2010 at 13:38, Julio Costa wrote:
> And this is where my head got reeeally spinning... can anyone, please,
> explain the reason to why this .exe magic exists, anyway?

I can't answer that, but there is a style of symlinks that use .lnk
files. Cygwin displays them without that extension, but the actual
filename is .lnk so presumably Cygwin has to do some 'lnk-magic' to
deal with that. I know it's not the same thing as exe-magic, but it
might be related because Cygwin has to hide the "reality" from the
user in order for the symlink to work.

On Wed, Jun 9, 2010 at 04:21, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
> There is.  "foo" can mean "foo". or "foo.lnk", or "foo.exe".  Cygwin is
> handling all these names as being the same file.

With symlinks I can understand this, but why match to .exe? Is it
because Cygwin allows a user to execute a .exe file without specifying
the .exe extension? That is perhaps wrong too - if I want to run
foo.exe, I should type ./foo.exe, not ./foo - but ./foo currently
works.

Then, perhaps this logic was translated into 'cp' (but not 'mv' for
some reason?) because people wanted to copy such executables around in
the same manner: "cp foo bar" rather than "cp foo.exe bar.exe" - but
this seems like merely a 'convenience' for Windows users and not a
very good one at that.

Oh well, yet another thing I suppose to add to my list of ways Windows
has set information technology back decades :-P

-- David.

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