On Tue, Jun 8, 2010 at 10:42 AM, <risin...@nationwide.com> wrote: > I disagree. This seems to me to be adopting the Microsoft policy of doing > the user's thinking for them: "I don't care what they want - we know > what's best for them." If a person wants to have "foo" and "foo.exe" in > the same directory, that should be allowed. A few times getting tripped > up by the wrong thing executing will be a good life lesson for the person, > and teach about how different operating systems work to boot. Should I > create "foo" as an executable, and "foo.exe" exists, then if I want to run > "foo.exe", I should have to call it out specifically. I can see this > might cause some confusion should, unbeknownst to the user, "foo.exe" > exists earlier in the path than "foo", but that would become an > education on how to use the PATH variable. This confusion arises > from Cygwin's kowtowing to Microsoft's dubious idea of using extensions to > control the handling of files.
If you took away Cygwin's .exe extension handling and just relied on file permissions like Unix, then using Cygwin tools from a cmd.exe prompt would become problematic. Windows wants that .exe (or .bat or .cmd or .msi, etc) extension and doesn't give a whip if you chmod a file's permissions +x. Without an extension, Windows has no idea what to do with the file. That's fine if you never do anything with Cygwin commands outside of a Cygwin shell, but I don't think this is a globally desirable behaviour. -Jason -- 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
