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From: Eric Blake <ebb9 AT byu DOT net>
Subject:  Re: Bash behavior change 2.05b-17 vs 2.05b-16
Date: Fri, 22 Jul 2005 19:57:41 +0000 (UTC)
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References:  <auto-000001135296 AT apollos DOT syrres DOT com>
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Victor Atkinson <atkinson <at> syrres.com> writes:

> 
> Greetings,
> 
> I recently updated my Cygwin installation from version 1.5.11-1 to 1.5.17-1.
> As I did so, I also updated all of my packages, including updating Bash from
> version 2.05b-16 to version 2.05b-17.

As long as you are upgrading, why not go all the way to cygwin-1.5.18-1 and 
bash-3.0-8?

> 
> After updating, a Bash script that I use for backing up my computer using
> WinZip failed to operate.  After some debugging, I concluded that the
> behavior of Bash when calling the WinZip command-line executable had
> changed.  Specifically, the treatment of the backslash '\' when launching
> executables seems to have changed.  Version 2.05b-17 seems to no longer
> accept '\' in the path name of an executable, even when protected or
> escaped.
> 

Are you sure it was bash and not cygwin that changed behavior?  Bash should not 
do anything special with backslash; it passes filenames to cygwin as they were 
typed.  Maybe it was cygwin's behavior of \ handling in converting POSIX paths 
back to Windows paths, particularly in the exec*() family of calls, that 
changed.  However, I noticed that when doing "strace bash -c 
c:\\\\winnt\\\\system32\\\\notepad.exe" (double quoting, since one level is 
stripped before strace, the other is stripped by the bash being traced) that 
bash treats c:\winnt\system32\notepad.exe as a relative path rather than 
absolute, and tries to prepend PATH entries to it.

My solution - DON'T USE BACKSLASHES in cygwin if you can help it.  Cygwin 
understands forward slash, and provides /cygdrive/c, so you might as well use 
them.  Besides, cygpath(1) is there to help you convert between Windows and 
POSIX path names.

--
Eric Blake
volunteer cygwin bash maintainer



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