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From: Andrew DeFaria <Andrew AT DeFaria DOT com>
Subject:  Forward slashes in path and pipes
Date:  Thu, 30 Jul 2009 20:17:37 -0700
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Found out a funny thing about Cygwin today. I've known for a while that 
forward slashes works as well as backslashes when specifying a path to 
execute. So all of the following work from a cmd prompt:

C:> C:\Cygwin\bin\ls
C:> C:\Cygwin/bin\ls
C:> C:/Cygwin/bin/ls

Also the following works:

C:> C:\Cygwin\bin\ls | more

However the following fails:

C:> C:\Cygwin/bin\ls | more

It fails with something like "C:\Cygwin\bin not found" (From memory).

What does this have to do with Cygwin you say? Well I recently had to 
figure out the Window's path for Cygwin's bin, actually /usr/bin and 
what I got back from the registry was something like 
D:\Profiles\<userid>\Cygwin<ver>/bin. Note that a default install of 
Cygwin included a path that included a forward slash. Of course what I 
was trying to do was a gzip piped to tar -tf -. To my utter surprise the 
forward slash caused this all to fail.

Thoughts?
-- 
Andrew DeFaria <http://defaria.com>
Very funny Scotty - now beam down my clothes.


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