Running Windows scripts & PATHEXT

[Andrew DeFaria <Andrew at DeFaria dot com>]

Being in a Windows environment is made a lot more palatable with Cygwin 
- we all know this. But we often face others who don't know, understand 
or want to use/learn Cygwin or who want what we might develop in Cygwin 
available for others who don't have Cygwin.  As such I've been writing 
some Visual Basic (ick! But I'm getting used to it...) and cmd scripts.

Now one problem is that I write a script intending for it to have 
stdin/stderr connected to a terminal. But by default vbs files are 
executed by wscript and calls to WScript.Echo pop up a message box for 
each call. However I can execute cscript to have it run "normally" 
writing to stdout. Now cscript display ugly logo info which can be 
suppressed by using /nologo. So I want an invocation of myscript.vbs to 
run cscript /nologo myscript.vbs. I think I can do that by making the 
appropriate registry entries but I still have to execute at least 
myscript.vbs.

I've also made a Perl script file type and have added .pl to the PATHEXT 
variable so that I can invoke a Perl script such as myscript.pl simply 
by typing myscript (in cmd but not in bash - in bash I need to specify 
myscript.pl).

So it seems that bash does not take into account the PATHEXT variable 
when searching for executables. Now I know that PATHEXT is very 
Window'ish and bash need not support it but perhaps Cygwin's bash does 
somehow and I merely need to configure it correctly? I"m looking to be 
able to simply type myscript and have it run myscript.pl (or 
myscript.cmd or myscript.vbs - I guess I oughta ask: How would it 
determine which one to run in the face of multiple scripts? I guess 
order of the PATHEXT?)
--
If you can smile when things go wrong, you have someone in mind to blame.


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