On Sat, Mar 05, 2005 at 06:55:12PM -0800, Brian Dessent wrote: > Arend-Jan Westhoff wrote: > > > It also seems inconsequent if what you say is truely correct and what is > > intended that when I use my file 'a' from my original example and do the > > following: > > copy a b > > that then: > > diff ./a .\b > > says that the files are completely different, whereas: > > diff ./a .\a > > says they are completely equal, while files a and b are character for > > character identical! > > I think this happens because diff calls stat() on both files and > recognizes that they are actually the same file without even reading > them. > > > Therefor in my opinion according to the User's Guide all files > > on my d: drive should have been opened by diff in text mode, > > which as we saw is currently not the case. > > They will, if you use '/' as the path separator. > > The fact is that Cygwin is trying to emulate/provide a POSIX type > environment to the apps that are running under it, and this means the > path separator is the '/', as on just about any unix-like system. If > you want Cygwin to perform newline-translation you should use POSIX > paths. When you specify a filename like "c:\windows\file.txt" or "a\b" > you are using Windows style paths and not POSIX style ones, and Cygwin > just passes them on straight to the underlying Windows system calls. > > I don't know enough about Cygwin history or internals to say why this is > the case. Someone who knows more about it would have to explain it. > And as you've seen it can lead to confusing situations.
Seems obvious to me that Cygwin is doing the right thing...
Let's say you have c:\windows mounted in binary mode as /winbin and also
mounted as text mode as /wintxt.
Cygwin treats...
- /winbin/file.txt as binary
- /wintxt/file.txt as text and does CRLF translation
- c:\windows\file.txt as binary since it is a native path and it
would obviously be futile to try and map it to a single mount
point
My .02$...
Sebastien
>
> That said, from what I can tell the ability for *some* Cygwin apps to
> accept '\'-style paths in *some* situations is more or less luck.
> 'diff' aside, there are probably many other ported Cygwin apps that will
> choke in strange ways if you try to feed them a path with '\' because
> they are all coded to recognise '/' as a path separator.
>
> The cygpath utility is provided for translating paths, so that if you
> have a windows program calling a cygwin one (or vice versa) you can
> convert the arguments between the two.
>
> Brian
>
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