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Date: Mon, 13 Feb 2006 07:33:07 -0700
From: Eric Blake <ebb9 AT byu DOT net>
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Subject: Re: default PATH
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According to Christopher Faylor on 2/12/2006 9:57 AM:
> 
> I don't mind protecting people against the evil 3PP which corrupt the
> PATH but, as I said, since we don't get that many complaints about the
> current behavior (which may actually have been in place for a decade) we
> don't want to necessarily penalize those smart people who have correctly
> deduced that Cygwin does a one-to-one translation to/from the windows
> path and have therefore put a ;; in their PATH expecting a translation
> to :: in the Cygwin path.

According to POSIX
(http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/basedefs/xbd_chap08.html):
"A zero-length prefix is a legacy feature that indicates the current
working directory. It appears as two adjacent colons ( "::" ), as an
initial colon preceding the rest of the list, or as a trailing colon
following the rest of the list. A strictly conforming application shall
use an actual pathname (such as .) to represent the current working
directory in PATH."

Anyone relying on ;; in %PATH% being turned into :: in $PATH is violating
the spirit of POSIX (just because :: must work does not mean that using it
is a good idea).  Such users should be using ;.; turned into :.: instead.

> 
> If we don't get a single person indicating that they rely on the current
> behavior then I'm ok with changing it.  We have a patch ready to be
> checked in, in fact.

No complaints so far; maybe it is time to check in the patch.  Just be
sure that on conversion from cygwin to win32 that '::' becomes ';.;'.

- --
Life is short - so eat dessert first!

Eric Blake             ebb9 AT byu DOT net
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