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Date: Sat, 14 Oct 2006 20:21:29 -0700
From: Brian Dessent <brian AT dessent DOT net>
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Subject: Re: TcLsh cannot follow symlinks?
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"J. Stevens" wrote:

> I have a feeling that tclsh (TcL shell) in cygwin cannot follow
> symlinks when using exec or other methods of calling programs.
> I am using a tclsh script that calls zcat, which is really a symlink to gzip.

Yes, that is to be expected I'm afraid.  The tcl distributed in Cygwin
is a somewhat exceptional package.  It is actually a windows app, i.e.
it does not use Cygwin for things like file IO.  Since symlinks are a
fiction the exist only inside Cygwin, native windows apps will choke on
them, just as they would choke on posix paths.  Unfortunately the tcl in
Cygwin is really only there as a means to support the insight debugger,
and insight is coupled to its in-tree version of tcl which leads to this
frankenstein-like situation of having a Cygwin package of a non-Cygwin
app.

I think there has been talk on the insight list about hopefully one day
decoupling insight from its bundled tcl, and I'm pretty sure that tcl
could be built as a proper Cygwin app not a MSVCRT one, so there is hope
that eventually this might be fixed, but it doesn't look like it will be
soon unless somebody steps up to the plate.  There was some talk about
this on cygwin-apps (along with supplying both GDI and X11 versions of
tk, too) but it went nowhere.

Brian

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