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Re: Forward slashes in path and pipes




Dave Korn wrote:
Andrew DeFaria wrote:
Found out a funny thing about Cygwin today. I've known for a while that
forward slashes works as well as backslashes when specifying a path to
execute. So all of the following work from a cmd prompt:

C:> C:\Cygwin\bin\ls
C:> C:\Cygwin/bin\ls
C:> C:/Cygwin/bin/ls

Also the following works:

C:> C:\Cygwin\bin\ls | more

However the following fails:

C:> C:\Cygwin/bin\ls | more

It fails with something like "C:\Cygwin\bin not found" (From memory).

What does this have to do with Cygwin you say?

Nothing. This is cmd.exe's idiosyncratic command-line parsing behaviour.
Agreed.
Try quoting it:
My personal solution was to change "/"'s -> "\"'s in the Perl function that I wrote to return the Windows oriented path to Cygwin's bin.

C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator>C:\Cygwin/bin\ls | more
'C:\Cygwin' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
operable program or batch file.

C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator>"C:\Cygwin/bin\ls" | more
Application Data
Cookies
Desktop
Favorites
Local Settings
My Documents
NTUSER.DAT
NetHood
PrintHood
Recent
SendTo
Start Menu
Templates
default.pls
ntuser.dat.LOG
ntuser.ini
schedlog.txt


C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator>
For some reason (the presence of the pipe?) cmd.exe parses the forward slash as an options separator rather than a path component in one case but not the other. Quoting removes the ambiguity.
Yes, my Cygwin question would be why does it store "/" in the registry for what is obviously a Windows path?
--
Andrew DeFaria <http://defaria.com>
Five out of four people have trouble with fractions.



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