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From: "David Christensen" <dpchrist AT holgerdanske DOT com>
To: <cygwin AT cygwin DOT com>
Subject: RE: Reading Term::ReadKey support for ActiveState Perl and Cygwin
Date: Sun, 21 May 2006 23:20:09 -0700
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Paul Dorman wrote:
> I've been racking my brains trying to read keystrokes in a Cygwin
> shell with ActiveState Perl.

I've tried using ActiveState Perl with Cygwin more than once in the past (to
experiment with Perl/Tk scripts?).  It was difficult.  I seem to recall that
invoking ActiveState from within Cygwin was very confusing.  Running
ActiveState-specific Perl scripts from a DOS box and using Cygwin Bash boxes
for editing, version control, etc., was much easier to understand.  I also
seem to recall that sometimes I would run a Perl script within Cygwin and it
would "fall through" to ActiveState Perl (missing a library in Cygwin
Perl?).  Perhaps I would have better luck now that I know more, but my needs
are command-line scripts and Cygwin with Cygwin Perl gets the job done.


I recently evaluated Microsoft Services for Unix (SFU), which aims to
provide a Unix subsystem and GNU tool chain running on top of the Windows
kernel:

    http://www.microsoft.com/technet/interopmigration/unix/sfu/default.mspx

Here is a commercial company that is closely aligned with SFU (I don't quite
understand the relationship):

     http://www.interix.com/

They have OSS add-on tools:

    http://www.interopsystems.com/tools/warehouse.aspx

I'm reasonably certain SFU uses ActiveState Perl.  I don't know if it's the
standard ActiveState Perl we can download and install for Win32, or a
special SFU build.

Unfortunately, I ran into some deal-breaker issues with SFU:

1.  SFU sets a number of environment variables (including PATH), which
    broke Cygwin Perl's ability to make modules.

2.  SFU uses Unix line endings by default.  I need tools that work with
    DOS line endings.  The SFU developers think that line endings
    should be dealt with on a per-application basis, not by the
    tool chain.  Some tools do accept both Unix and DOS line endings.
    The SFU developers were responsive to my request to get SFU Bash
    working with DOS line endings, but it isn't ready yet:

        http://www.interix.com/tools/tm.aspx?m=9028


Another possibility for a OSS GNU tool chain on Windows is UWIN, from AT&T:

    http://www.research.att.com/sw/tools/uwin/

This statement from the UWIN page looks promising, given my needs:

    Most of the UNIX API is implemented by the POSIX.DLL dynamically
    loaded (shared) library. Programs linked with POSIX.DLL run under
    the WIN32 subsystem instead of the POSIX subsystem, so programs can
    freely intermix UNIX and WIN32 library calls.

I hope to evaluate UWIN soon.


HTH,

David


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