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Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2001 00:57:07 -0400
From: "Fred T. Hamster" <fred AT gruntose DOT com>
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To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Subject: Re: Cygwin: Interoperability Is Important (was Cygwin: Open or Closed System, etc)
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Robert Collins wrote:

>I'm not agreeing or disagreeing about the design goal. I simply want to
>make a very small but important point... "cygwin" that is the
>cygwin1.dll has full support for ms dos or more accurately win32
>pathnames. Call fstat(), or fopen() or ... and give it a ms dos
>pathname. If there is a real file with that msdos pathname the call will
>behave as you would expect it to. 
>Finito. Done. No problems. Possibly minor tweaks needed for performance or bugfixing.
>
i agree, on specific file names without wildcards, there are usually no 
problems unless one is foolish enough to provide the wrong case for 
characters in the name.  however, it still seems to me that wildcards 
are an important topic in parsing pathnames.  that is where i see some 
possibilities for improvement that would make the usage of cygwin a bit 
more seamless with ms-windows apps.

>$ echo "c" > "foo"
>$ echo "a" >  "foo:1" 
>$ echo "b" > "foo:2"
> now cat foo - it will still be "c". cat foo:1 and get "a".
>
that is really freaky.  thanks for the explanation.  so, if one were to 
interpret a situation where the "second character is a colon" as meaning 
"that the colon is always a drive letter", then that would be incorrect 
for the set of filenames that are exactly one letter long, providing 
that one wanted to set up streams on those filenames.  i'm certainly not 
inclined towards asking for that kind of support to be added to cygwin, 
although it does appear to be part of win32.  even some win32 programs 
have issues with it though; when i tried "type foo:2", i got a complaint 
that "The filename, directory name, or volume label syntax is 
incorrect."  so microsoft's api is incompletely applied within their 
distributed toolset.  for some reason, i am not surprised at that.
thanks,
fred.

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