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Date: Mon, 29 Mar 2010 19:21:35 +0200
From: Corinna Vinschen <corinna-cygwin AT cygwin DOT com>
To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Subject: Re: rxvt and mintty fail with SHELL=c:\bin\bash.exe
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On Mar 29 17:45, Paul Bibbings wrote:
> Tim McDaniel <tmcd AT panix DOT com> writes:
> 
> > I've used rxvt for many years, because I don't want to set up an X
> > server and I was able to do everything I want with it.  Since the last
> > update, if I clicked on my shortcut to rxvt, or ran it from cmd.exe,
> > it flashed open a window and then immediately closed it.  But I could
> > start "c:\bin\bash" with or without "-l" from cmd.exe.
> >
> > I went to the mailing lists and saw the recent problem reports about
> > rxvt, "modified cygwin.bat for rxvt - window does not stay up in
> > 1.7.2" (but I was already using a full path) and that rxvt does not
> > and will never understand Unicode.
> >
> > So I decided to try mintty.  But IT also flashed up its window and
> > immediately closed it.
> >
> > Bless the mintty developers who included the "-l, --log FILE" option.
> >
> >     $ cat mintty.log
> >     exec: c:\bin\bash.exe: No such file or directory$
> >
> >     c:\home\tmcdaniel>set | c:\bin\grep bash
> >     SHELL=c:\bin\bash.exe
> >
> > SHELL is set in My Computer's system environment variables.  I don't
> > know why I set it in Windows syntax years ago.  I might guess that I
> > wanted to keep open the possibility of using %SHELL% in cmd.exe and
> > "$SHELL" in bash.
> >
> > I changed SHELL to /bin/bash, and now both rxvt and mintty start up
> > fine.
> 
> In encountered exactly the same problem with minnty and with xterm
> running under the XWin server immediately upon, (gratefully and eagerly!)
> installing the update.  Like you, I quickly traced the problem
> back to SHELL being set using a Windows path.  Initially I was also
> unsure as the why I had set this at some unspecified time in the past
> and was happy to change it to get mintty and xterm working again.
> [...]
>   But it
> is worth noting, from my experience, that there are nevertheless issues
> of conflict with other non-Cygwin software that requires SHELL to be set
> the `native' way. (To clarify, I am using GNU Emacs 23.1.1
> (i386-mingw-nt6.0.6002, not the version from the Cygwin package.)

This should work again in 1.7.3.  The original change which resulted
in the aforementioned behaviour was fixing a security problem.  The
fact that DOS paths didn't work anymore is not a big deal for most
people, but it wasn't actually intended either.

For the records:  Native tools like the Mingw GNU Emacs you're using
should not use $SHELL, IMHO.  They should use $COMSPEC and keep SHELL
and other POSIX environment variables to the POSIX tools.


Corinna

-- 
Corinna Vinschen                  Please, send mails regarding Cygwin to
Cygwin Project Co-Leader          cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Red Hat

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