Stefan Bodewig wrote: [rearranged] > you invoke must be a symlink (is this possible on Cygwin?)
Cygwin apparently has its own symlink mechanism. From my current installation, the content of /cygwin/bin/aclocal-1.7 is !<symlink>../autotool/devel/bin/aclocal-1.7 Note that there are also the .lnk files inherited from Win95, which are interpreted by Explorer components but probably not handled by Cygwin (I didn't try), and NTFS has also its own capability for symlinks, though I doubt this was ever used for production.
Cygwin - as I have no idea how it handles absolute paths.
The problem is that drive letter+colon combinations can be interpreted as a path, you can e.g. do ls c: and get the dir listing of your C drive. Valid drive letters can change dynamically both due to innvoking mount/umount commands and Windows drive mounts. Internally such names are mapped to path names like /cygdrive/c (prefix is configurable, so YMMV). It is possible that cygpath can be used to expand C: to /cygdrive/c in shell scripts, there ought to be a manual explaining this...
J.Pietschmann
