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Date: Wed, 19 Sep 2007 18:25:47 -0700
From: Brian Dessent <brian AT dessent DOT net>
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CC: "Matt Seitz (matseitz)" <matseitz AT cisco DOT com>
Subject: Re: Ls POSIX style slink output
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Eric Blake wrote:

> Symlinks merely contain whatever text they were created with.  If the text
> it was created with was Windows style, then readlink(2) will not translate
> it.  I suppose I could try to patch ln(1) to posix-ify any name that looks
> like a Windows filename before actually calling symlink(2), but I'm not
> sure it buys much.  So for now, it's a feature, not a bug.

Yes, those symlinks in /etc are explicitly created with Win32 paths by
the base-files postinstall script.  I think the reasoning here is that
if a POSIX path were used for the target of the symlink then it would
have to be updated if the user ever changed the name of the /cygdrive
prefix, whereas just using a Win32 path is always correct and insulates
from that variable.

Moreover, I think recent versions of the Cygwin DLL (i.e. 1.7/HEAD) do
in fact normalize the target to be in POSIX form when reading the
contents of the symlink file.  I seem to recall a headsup from Corinna
about this a while ago.  This means no special accomodations are needed
in 'ls'.

Brian

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