I'm not necessarily sure that the subject is clear enough, so I want to be explicit that I'm talking about files (or I guess potentially directories, though I've never seen that) generated by the `try_to_bin` function in winsup/cygwin/syscalls.cc. Specifically, you can generate one with this simple bash reproducer:
cp /usr/bin/sleep.exe . ./sleep 1000 & rm -f ./sleep.exe kill %1 fg My questions are (starting at the beginning with what I'm trying to accomplish, and wandering off into the weeds of the various things I've tried to do that). 1) is there some mechanism in Cygwin that I'm not seeing to clean up these files? So far I've confirmed that their creation does not result in the recycle bin icon turning from 'empty' to 'full' on the desktop, and that emptying the recycle bin there (when it doesn't think it's already empty) does not remove them. 2) assuming there is not, I want to make a script using only things present in a "base system" to clean them up. This isn't too horribly difficult, using bash and find, *if I can assume that all Windows volumes are rooted at drive letters*. Once I take into account Windows folder-mounted volumes, I need to be able to find a list of all volume roots, in a safe way. I hacked together a sed script that parses the output of `mountvol`, but that is clearly not safe (not only did it rely on a message that is likely translated, but mountvol seems to switch to ANSI output when it is piped or redirected, and any unicode characters turn into '_') [1]. I made a C program to do this [2], and that's fine, except I really wanted to avoid having to ship a new binary. Is there any way in Cygwin to get this list? Maybe this is something that should be added to cygpath? 3) in furtherance of figuring that out, I started grepping around for FindNextVolumeW and GetVolumePathNamesForVolumeNameW in cygwin, and found the dos_drive_mappings class in winsup/cygwin/mount.cc. This is sort-of exposed via the cygwin_internal function CW_ALLOC_DRIVE_MAP, though the type itself is not. As a proof-of-concept hack, I wrote another C program based on this [3], but I don't think that really helps anything. 4) while pondering this, I keep coming back to the idea that volume folder mounts could be exposed via the 'normal' mount interface, such as `getmntent`, `/proc/self/mounts`, `/proc/self/mountinfo`), as children of the drive-letter cygdrive mounts. This would make getting the list of mounts safely a solved problem(*), and would probably also have the bonus effect of letting `df` list their free space. Is there a good reason that this is not already done (other than SHTDI)? * I found a bug/limitation here, which I will report in a separate email, because that doesn't depend on any of this. 5) in addition, I ported the C example programs to python ctypes, and factored out to a small module [4], but that also doesn't really help, because python is not part of the "base system". But it might be useful to somebody else, so I link to it here too. [1]: https://github.com/msys2/MSYS2-packages/issues/4622#issuecomment-2140990166 [2]: https://gist.github.com/jeremyd2019/8e088a72dfef44ee29ed3442957c1e65 [3]: https://gist.github.com/jeremyd2019/ac2f00ec448e75c4bd3630926201db19 [4]: https://gist.github.com/jeremyd2019/95c2cfd7eef2ed29a339860896deddec -- Problem reports: https://cygwin.com/problems.html FAQ: https://cygwin.com/faq/ Documentation: https://cygwin.com/docs.html Unsubscribe info: https://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
