Date: Wed, 17 Sep 1997 12:49:03 +0300 (IDT)
From: Eli Zaretskii <eliz AT is DOT elta DOT co DOT il>
To: "Peter J. Farley III" <pjfarley AT dorsai DOT org>
cc: djgpp AT delorie DOT com
Subject: Re: Suggestion for future DJGPP development -- depend on bash
In-Reply-To: <341f246b.3479011@snews.zippo.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.SUN.3.91.970917124809.27934N-100000@is>
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On Wed, 17 Sep 1997, Peter J. Farley III wrote:

> I'm curious, though -- in what cases did bash's sysroot and //d/dir
> trick *not* work?

The problem is that, apart of Bash, the rest of DJGPP (and non-DJGPP
programs) don't understand this syntax, so Bash has to translate this
back to the DOS d:/dir form.  But for this, Bash should know which
arguments are filenames and which aren't, which is hard.  So Bash does
the conversion in all such cases.  A frequent case where this logic
fails is with Sed scripts which usually include slashes.

Another problem is that this conversion couldn't be done for Bash
internal commands such as `echo', because it would again break some
Unix scripts which use `echo' to transform variable names (as in
"echo $foo | sed -e ...").  Enabling the conversion for external
commands only is better, but it doesn't always work either, e.g., when
the echoe'ed string is used as part of command line passed to a
program.

In short, it's a mess.