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Date: Thu, 17 Jan 2008 10:39:08 -0500
From: Duncan Murdoch <murdoch AT stats DOT uwo DOT ca>
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Subject: rm fails with bad mount information
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I'm a Windows maintainer for the R project.  We include the Cygwin 
rm.exe program in the toolset we've put together for developers, and 
have occasionally heard that it fails.

A few days ago I tracked down the cause of failure to the following:

Users who install Cygwin then uninstall it (perhaps improperly, I'm not 
sure) can be left with the registry key

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Cygnus Solutions\Cygwin\mounts v2\/]

set with a non-existent path as the "native" string value (which is 
normally be something like "c:\\cygwin").  When that happens, "rm -rf 
subdir" fails with this message:

C:\temp  rm -rf test
rm: failed to get attributes of `/': No such file or directory

I suspect this is user error in uninstalling Cygwin improperly, but it's 
still somewhat perplexing to users.  Perhaps rm (and other utilities 
doing whatever it is doing) should be more robust against bad mounts?

The version info I see is as follows:

C:\temp rm --version
rm (GNU coreutils) 6.9
Copyright (C) 2007 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software.  You may redistribute copies of it under the terms of
the GNU General Public License <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.

Written by Paul Rubin, David MacKenzie, Richard Stallman, and Jim Meyering.

Duncan Murdoch

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