From: flitterio AT amulet DOT com (Fran Litterio) Subject: Value of _PATH replaces PATH in shell scripts! Why? 3 Jan 1997 16:24:13 -0800 Sender: daemon AT cygnus DOT com Approved: cygnus DOT gnu-win32 AT cygnus DOT com Distribution: cygnus Message-ID: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Original-To: "'gnu-win32 AT cygnus DOT com'" X-Mailer: Microsoft Exchange Server Internet Mail Connector Version 4.0.994.63 Original-Sender: owner-gnu-win32 AT cygnus DOT com Recently I reported a problem where the value of PATH was corrupted in all of my shell scripts and that I couldn't run scripts except by explicit pathname (i.e., just typing "foo" would not run script foo -- I had to type "bin/foo"). I've tracked it down to something wierd: If your environment has the variable _PATH in it (note the leading underscore), then the value of _PATH replaces the value of PATH in shell scripts! I was setting my NT path like so (using the Environment tab of the System Properties dialog): _PATH=c:\franl\bin;c:\winnt\system32;c:\winnt;c:\dos;c:\whatever PATH=%_PATH% This, combined with the above wierd behavior, was causing all of my shell scripts to fail with this error scriptname: scriptname: No such file or directory which is the classic sign that the shell named in the #! line of the script can't be found. But my scripts all start with #!/bin/sh, and I have the cygwin32 bin directory mounted on /bin, and I have bash installed as both /bin/bash.exe and /bin/sh.exe. So I stopped setting _PATH in my NT environment, and I put this in my bash startup file: export _PATH="$PATH" and all my shell scripts work again -- perfectly. I can even run them without using explicit pathnames. Happiness. But can anyone explain this _PATH thing? Is this an NT feature (the MSDN CD had zero to say about it)? Or is bash/cygwin.dll causing this behavior? -- Francis Litterio franl AT amulet 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".