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Date: Sat, 24 Aug 2002 21:26:18 -0700
To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
From: Randall R Schulz <rrschulz AT cris DOT com>
Subject: RE: faq: why doesn't tilde expansion work in shell scripts in
  cyg win?
In-Reply-To: <15FDCE057B48784C80836803AE3598D53B885A@racerx.ixiacom.com>
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Dan,

At 21:02 2002-08-24, Dan Kegel wrote:
>Aha. I figured it out, and it looks like Cygwin's ash might not be posix 
>compliant. Tilde expansion is required by Posix; see 
><http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007904975/utilities/xcu_chap02.html#tag_02_06_01>
>
>Looking at the source for the ash used in Cygwin, it looks like tilde 
>expansion is disabled! The Makefile.am in 
><http://programming.ccp14.ac.uk/ftp-mirror/programming/cygwin/pub/cygwin/release/ash/ash-20020731-1-src.tar.bz2> 
>defines SMALL by default, which shuts off tilde expansion. That would 
>explain my result (though not why tilde works from the ash commandline; 
>curious).

Please explain "works from the ash commandline." I can see no circumstance 
in which tilde expansion is happening in ash.


>Am I correct?  It's a little suprising to find Cygwin doesn't use a 
>Posix-compliant shell...

As I understand it, Cygwin includes ash specifically as a very-light-weight 
shell for scripting and makefiles. It's small size and minimal feature set 
gives it a low start-up time, which helps a lot when many of them get 
executed, for example when running make.


>- Dan


Randall Schulz
Mountain View, CA USA


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