From: john AT rrci DOT com ("John D. Robertson") Subject: Re: Absolute file-path under bash (cygwin32) 17 Apr 1997 13:39:00 -0700 Approved: cygnus DOT gnu-win32 AT cygnus DOT com Distribution: cygnus Message-ID: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII X-Sender: john AT localhost Original-To: Paul Prescod Original-Cc: Hawkeye , jeffdb AT netzone DOT com, gnu-win32 AT cygnus DOT com In-Reply-To: <3354E347.A3E5C3EC@calum.csclub.uwaterloo.ca> Original-Sender: owner-gnu-win32 AT cygnus DOT com This is a perplexing problem because: 1) Pathname manipulating shell scripts will break if DOS conventions are used. 2) Most of us hate DOS conventions. 3) DOS & Windows programs will not run without DOS conventions. 4) Bash cannot know which way to translate for all cases. The optimal solution is to provide a Windows95/NT runtime environment under Linux, or Free BSD, etc. SGI ships such a product on their new workstations, but it is a software emulation, and slower than hell, even on an R10000. I guess WABI is such a product that is as fast as running under Windows, but only works for Windows 3.1, which nobody cares about anymore. Then only reason I run Windows95 at all is that ADAMS is not available for Linux, and is prohibitively expensive for other Unix platforms. Sigh. JDR |======================================================| | John D. Robertson, ADAMS Modeler / Software Engineer | | Robertson & Robertson Consultants, Inc. | | 3637 West Georgia Rd. | | Pelzer, SC 29669 | | | | Phone: (864) 243-2436 | | Fax: (864) 243-3023 | | Email: john AT rrci DOT com | |======================================================| On Wed, 16 Apr 1997, Paul Prescod wrote: > Hawkeye wrote: > > That could only ever work partially, at best. Filenames aren't > > necessarily distinct words in the argument list (consider an option > > like "-I/usr/local/include"), and every word in the argument list > > shouldn't necessarily be interpeted as a cygwin filename (consider > > "echo dir /w >foo.bat"). > > Either of these problems are easily fixed. How do you recognize variable > names so that they can be replaced? With a special character. I don't > know bash enough to know what character or character combination is left > over, though. Maybe $/ as in $/foo/bar.com . Do variable names ever > start with $/? > > > The only "right" place to interpret filenames is in the API calls made by > > an application. > > It is already too late for that. We can't fix all of the Windows > software in the world, and we can't fix all of the Unix source code in > the world. We must either manually convert pathnames forever or we must > have a way of letting the computer differentiate them. I prefer the > latter. > > Paul Prescod > > > - > For help on using this list (especially unsubscribing), send a message to > "gnu-win32-request AT cygnus DOT com" with one line of text: "help". > - For help on using this list (especially unsubscribing), send a message to "gnu-win32-request AT cygnus DOT com" with one line of text: "help".