This is a minor issue and probably not typical, but could be of interest to cygwin developers/maintainers.
Problem: After building a 3-party cross-toolchain (unrelated to cygwin), mintty is no longer able to start. While a few mintty windows that were still open worked ok, any NEW mintty window just flashed and immediately closed itself. Solution: Re-installation of cygwin from scratch is undesirable because current installation already has multiple customizations. Initial research yielded nothing - no error message, or hint of any kind, and discussion forums offered no clue either. The cause of the issue happened to be an empty file /bin/bash. It is currently unclear where it came from (could be a side effect of a build), but it is not part of standard cygwin installation. Once this empty file is deleted, mintty is able to start again. Suggestion: produce an error message that would help identifying this problem when mintty starts. NOTE: this issue happens only in cygwin, and only when both files are present: /bin/bash.exe and empty /bin/bash. If no bash is present, mintty issues a correct error message. -- Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/ Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
