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From: "Ross Boulet" <ross AT rossb DOT com>
To: "'Cygwin List'" <cygwin AT cygwin DOT com>
Subject: RE: What kind of executable is zcat? Crashes from cmd.exe
Date: Thu, 12 Feb 2004 15:46:44 -0600
Message-ID: <001e01c3f1b1$b93d3ed0$6401a8c0@RossLap>
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> 
> At 03:22 PM 2/12/2004, Bakken, Luke you wrote:
> >> Jamshid Afshar wrote:
> >> > I just installed Cygwin. What kind of executable is 
> >> zcat.exe? It doesn't
> >> > show up when I "dir c:\cygwin\bin\zc*" (only zcmp), but I 
> >> see it's 19
> >> > bytes in Explorer. It works fine within bash, but I want 
> >> UNIX utilities I
> >> > can use in the regular Windows Command Prompt.
> >> 
> >> $ ls -l zcat.exe
> >> lrwxrwxrwx    1 rcampbel Users          19 Jan  6 17:06 
> >> zcat.exe -> gzip.exe
> >> 
> >> As you can see from the ls output, it's a symbolic link 
> >> (doesn't work in 
> >> cmd).  You can still call gunzip -c (or whatever).
> >
> >I had a similar problem when trying to use gunzip from a cmd prompt
> >outside of a cygwin shell - I was getting illegal ntvdm CPU 
> errors. The
> >fix is to replace the softlink with a hard link:
> >
> >$ cd /bin
> >/bin
> >$ ls -l zcat*
> >lrwxrwxrwx    1 lukeb    Users          19 Sep 21 16:29 zcat.exe ->
> >gzip.exe
> >/bin
> >$ rm zcat.exe 
> >/bin
> >$ ln gzip.exe zcat.exe
> >/bin
> >$ ls -li zcat* gzip* gunzip*
> >1125899906888251 -rwxr-xr-x+   3 lukeb    Users       62976 
> Jul 23  2003
> >gunzip.exe
> >1125899906888251 -rwxr-xr-x+   3 lukeb    Users       62976 
> Jul 23  2003
> >gzip.exe
> >1125899906888251 -rwxr-xr-x+   3 lukeb    Users       62976 
> Jul 23  2003
> >zcat.exe
> >
> >I would suggest doing the same with any other cygwin 
> executable that is
> >a symbolic link that you intend to use "outside" cygwin.
> 
> 
> Sure, that's another option but one that eats up disk space if your 
> partition isn't formatted for NTFS.  Replacing "ln" with "ln 
> -s" in your
> examples above will get you "Windows shortcuts" which you can 
> use at the
> command prompt directly, so long as you don't mind typing 
> ".lnk" at the
> end of each linked executable.  This assumes you haven't added 
> "nowinsymlinks" to your CYGWIN environment variable of course.  This 
> approach will save the disk space on non-NTFS partitions.
> 
> 
One other caveat I have found with using hard links (on an NTFS partition)
involves upgrades.  I changed the symlink for ksh.exe -> pdksh.exe to a hard
link.  When an new version of pdksh was installed, it resulted in two non
linked files.  I had the new version as psksh.exe and the old version as
ksh.exe.

Ross



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