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From: "Michel LaBarre" <michel DOT labarre AT rogers DOT com>
To: <cygwin AT cygwin DOT com>
Subject: PATHEXT is fundamental to Windows and Should be recognised by CYGWIN
Date: Wed, 3 Aug 2016 21:43:46 -0400
Message-ID: <001001d1edf1$a4e1ae90$eea50bb0$@rogers.com>
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The CYGWIN site makes it quite difficult to discern how somebody can report
an issue or comment.

In any event, I subscribed to the cygwin mailing list and am replying to one
of the many links sent to me in case this happens to be a way to comment.

Problem 1:  Cygwin does not support PATHEXT and really should.

Fundamental reason:  from the Cygwin FAQ - What is it?  "Cygwin is a
distribution of popular GNU and other Open Source tools running on Microsoft
Windows."

PATHEXT is as fundamental component of Windows program execution as PATH.
 Without using extensions, bash can use execution privileges to determine if
a file is executable.  However, that does not work when invoking a command
from CMD.  This means that when invoked from BASH, you name a command "ZOT"
but "ZOT.sh" (or similar) if invoked from CMD.  The published solutions in
the various FAQs are not satisfactory. Creating links between ZOT.sh and ZOT
creates substantial overhead.  If CYGWIN really intends to support Windows
it should support its fundamental execution framework.  It should be equally
easy to invoke a bash script from a bash script or a CMD script.  (This is
not insurmountable as the MKS toolkit has supported this for decades.)

Problem 2:  Cygwin does not support CR-LF delimiters.  For the same reason,
it is unfortunate that CYGWIN/bash does not cope with both types of line
delimiters transparently.

I have been using and developing system software within Unix since 1974 and
Windows since the mid-80's.  in more recent years (since the mid-90's) I
have developed extensive sets of tools (sh/awk/etc..) for corporate and
public sector clients - on the order of 100,000 lines of code for
representative projects.  Most had to run under both Solaris and Windows
environments for which I used the MKS toolkit. 

Michel LaBarre


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