From: noer AT cygnus DOT com (Geoffrey Noer) Subject: Re: questions on bash 10 Dec 1996 03:17:43 -0800 Sender: daemon AT cygnus DOT com Approved: cygnus DOT gnu-win32 AT cygnus DOT com Distribution: cygnus Message-ID: <199612100956.BAA04039.cygnus.gnu-win32@cirdan.cygnus.com> Content-Type: text Original-To: epeschko AT elmer DOT tci DOT com (Ed Peschko) Original-Cc: gnu-win32 AT cygnus DOT com, noer AT cygnus DOT com (Geoffrey Noer) In-Reply-To: <199612100136.SAA01578@aitsun95.tci.com> from "Ed Peschko" at Dec 9, 96 06:36:57 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL23] Content-Length: 2839 Original-Sender: owner-gnu-win32 AT cygnus DOT com 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 noer AT cygnus DOT com - For help on using this list, send a message to "gnu-win32-request AT cygnus DOT com" with one line of text: "help".