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Date: Sat, 03 Mar 2007 19:19:25 -0800
From: Brian Dessent <brian AT dessent DOT net>
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Subject: Re: very odd behavior of Cygwin python from CMD
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David Abrahams wrote:

> Now, I am writing a program that must use CMD to probe for python in
> the PATH and check its version.  If I do the naive thing and just try
> to invoke "python," and there's a Cygwin installation, my program will
> crash or freeze.  So the question is, what do I do instead?

One way to handle this would be to check if the thing found in the path
looks like a symlink (say, by having a size less than a hundred bytes
and the 'S' attribute set) and if so, launch it as "sh.exe -c python",
using sh.exe in the same dir as the shortcut.  This will invoke python
through the shell, which will follow symlinks.  Non-cygwin programs will
have no idea what a symlink is.

Brian

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