Re: cp.exe bug

[Mark Blackburn <marklist at fangorn dot ca>]

Ross Boulet wrote:

[...]

> Above is the makefile which produced the error.  The cause seems to be cp's
> handling of a .exe file.  A simple way to get what I now see as a misleading
> error message from cp is:
>
> $ touch foo.exe
> $ cp foo bar    # note the absence of the .exe extension
> cp: `foo' and `bar' are the same file
>  
This problem still exists in the coreutils-5.2.0-1 package that I have 
recently posted on cygwin-apps.

> Alan's issue arose from the fact that his makefile used a symbol for the
> resulting executable and gcc naturally appends the .exe in the cygwin
> environment.  When he tries to use the symbol in his cp command, the .exe is
> not there and cp gives the 'same file' error message.  I did some googling
> and found this issue has been mentioned in several threads.  From what I can
> gather, at least one iteration of fileutils would allow making a copy of a
> .exe file without using the extension, as long as another file with the same
> basename and no .exe extension did not exist.
>
> It looks like there was some code in fileutils 4.1-1 to handle .exe copies
> like this, but the code was removed from the released cp in fileutils 4.1-2.
>  
I've been looking at the fileutils-4.1-1 and fileutils-4.1-2 source code 
and AFAICT there has been some .exe handling code ripped out between 
these versions. I assume it was problematic but I haven't been able to 
dig up a bug report that explains why it was taken out.

> http://www.cygwin.com/ml/cygwin-announce/2001/msg00081.html 
>
> http://www.cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2003-04/msg00017.html
>
>
>  
Mark Blackburn

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