Date: Sun, 05 Aug 2001 21:35:31 +0300
From: "Eli Zaretskii" <eliz AT is DOT elta DOT co DOT il>
Sender: halo1 AT zahav DOT net DOT il
To: djgpp-workers AT delorie DOT com
Message-Id: <2950-Sun05Aug2001213530+0300-eliz@is.elta.co.il>
X-Mailer: Emacs 20.6 (via feedmail 8.3.emacs20_6 I) and Blat ver 1.8.9
In-reply-to: <3B6D4C04.2916.9C527C@localhost> (snowball3@bigfoot.com)
Subject: Re: bash djgpp.env patch
References:  <3B6D4C04 DOT 2916 DOT 9C527C AT localhost>
Reply-To: djgpp-workers AT delorie DOT com
Errors-To: nobody AT delorie DOT com
X-Mailing-List: djgpp-workers AT delorie DOT com
X-Unsubscribes-To: listserv AT delorie DOT com
Precedence: bulk

> From: "Mark E." <snowball3 AT bigfoot DOT com>
> Date: Sun, 5 Aug 2001 13:37:08 -0400
> 
> djgpp.env contains lines that change backslashes to slashes in PATH before 
> Bash sees the variable.  Therefore unless PATH is explicitly changes, a 
> program will receive PATH as it was at startup which isn't desirable since it 
> will have forward slashes.

Why is this undesirable?  Do you know about any specific program which
has problems with forward slashes in PATH?

FWIW, Emacs has been mirroring backslashes to forward slashes in PATH
since 1995, when Morten wrote the code to do that, and the only
complaint I heard during all those years was about nmake which claimed
it couldn't find the Microsoft compiler.

> Since at least 2.03, Bash has had code to handle 
> importing and exporting variables like PATH, but it isn't run in the case of 
> the caching I described. So the entries in djgpp.env serve no purpose and 
> cause Bash to export a bad PATH.

This entry was added to djgpp.env because programs which were invoked
by Bash would echo parts of PATH with backslashes, and cause Bash to
interpret the backslashes in the result incorrectly as escape
characters.  This was a long time ago, and it's quite possible that it
is no longer needed.  However, if there's no good reason to remove
this, I think we shouldn't.