DMARC-Filter: OpenDMARC Filter v1.3.2 sourceware.org D38963952DB2
Date: Fri, 12 Jun 2020 08:06:24 +0100 (GMT Summer Time)
To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Subject: symbolic links to /cygdrive/X/xxx with capital letter X
Message-ID: <alpine.WNT.2.00.2006120735160.21688@panamint>
User-Agent: Alpine 2.00 (WNT 1167 2008-08-23)
MIME-Version: 1.0
From: Arthur Norman via Cygwin <cygwin AT cygwin DOT com>
Reply-To: Arthur Norman <acn1 AT cam DOT ac DOT uk>
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Sender: "Cygwin" <cygwin-bounces AT cygwin DOT com>

This running on Windows 10 1909 and cygwin has been updated to the latest 
version. The effect was also visible on a freshly installed minimal cygwin 
put on an almost fresh Windows 10 VM.

Cygwin these days seems to have a behaviour that confuses me regarding the 
case of a disk name:

> ln -s "/cygdrive/c/Program Files" pf1
> ln -s "/cygdrive/C/Program Files" pf2
> ls -l pf*
lrwxrwxrwx 1 acn1 None 25 Jun 12 07:37 pf1 -> /cygdrive/c/Program Files
lrwxrwxrwx 1 acn1 None 20 Jun 12 07:37 pf2 -> /mnt/C/Program Files
> cygpath -ma ./pf1
C:/cygwin64/home/acn1/pf1

You see from the above that when I use cygpath to convert from a cygwin 
name the drive letter C: is returned in upper case. When that ends up 
after "/cygdrive" the path behaves as I expect almost everywhere by is 
treated specially for symbolic links. This seems to be a relatively new 
behaviour and it bit me!

[Use-case: I wanted to convert cygwin paths to be "very absolute" so that 
eg my home directory is not rendered as /home/acn1 but as 
/cygdrive/c/cygwin64/home/acn1, so I had a few lines of shell script to 
achieve that. I was building a package and I build both a cygwin32 and a 
cygwin64 version, so the "very absolute" paths are portable between the 
two worlds, both of which were important when I first set this up. Things 
recently broke and on investigation it was because somewhere deep in 
build scripts links to /mnt/C/... had been set up and were not usable. I 
can of course work round the issue but being confident I have spotted all 
cases causes me work!]

Arthur

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