-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 According to Christopher Faylor on 2/12/2006 9:57 AM: > > I don't mind protecting people against the evil 3PP which corrupt the > PATH but, as I said, since we don't get that many complaints about the > current behavior (which may actually have been in place for a decade) we > don't want to necessarily penalize those smart people who have correctly > deduced that Cygwin does a one-to-one translation to/from the windows > path and have therefore put a ;; in their PATH expecting a translation > to :: in the Cygwin path.
According to POSIX (http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/basedefs/xbd_chap08.html): "A zero-length prefix is a legacy feature that indicates the current working directory. It appears as two adjacent colons ( "::" ), as an initial colon preceding the rest of the list, or as a trailing colon following the rest of the list. A strictly conforming application shall use an actual pathname (such as .) to represent the current working directory in PATH." Anyone relying on ;; in %PATH% being turned into :: in $PATH is violating the spirit of POSIX (just because :: must work does not mean that using it is a good idea). Such users should be using ;.; turned into :.: instead. > > If we don't get a single person indicating that they rely on the current > behavior then I'm ok with changing it. We have a patch ready to be > checked in, in fact. No complaints so far; maybe it is time to check in the patch. Just be sure that on conversion from cygwin to win32 that '::' becomes ';.;'. - -- Life is short - so eat dessert first! Eric Blake [EMAIL PROTECTED] -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.1 (Cygwin) Comment: Public key at home.comcast.net/~ericblake/eblake.gpg Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFD8Jij84KuGfSFAYARAr0hAJ48kUwEDazUM4oDTZqXThLjdOeymgCg1YX7 K0C3Tw4ky3dE01zO4hrXzQY= =Tslh -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/