Re: aux as filename

[Eric Blake <ebb9 at byu dot net>]

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According to Francky Leyn on 6/25/2007 3:20 AM:
> 
> Whatever cygwin command I issue on those aux.* files, it hangs.
> cp, find, mv, ls, and so on, they all "hang" whenever they encounter
> the first aux.* file. Perhaps this is because they use stat, and this
> underlying stat aux.* hangs.

You're not the first to discover this.

> 
> Why is this? Could cygwin stat not handle this exception,  so that
> all these commands no longer hang?
> Why does it hang? After all, the aux.* file is on
> an ISO 9660? file system, not on a NTFS file system.

By default, unless you use a managed mount, cygwin defers to Windows
filename parsing.  If windows hangs on a special name (which it does on
aux), then so does cygwin, because deep down, cygwin is just a Windows
application.  The aux filename is special to Windows no matter where it is
encountered.

>> This is done in cygwin, using the notion of 'managed mounts'.
> 
> Can someone explain me or give me a pointer to documentation
> how I can use this in my case?

man mount

In short, if you want to expand a tarball that contains a file such as
aux.c, or that has both foo and FOO, or any other problematic combination,
the easiest solution is to:

mkdir managed
mount -o managed "`cygpath -am managed" managed
cd managed
tar xvf problematic.tar

> 
> How do we solve this? Due to this exception, I must copy everything
> manually for the moment. Time consuming, error prone, prehistorically,
> and not the UNIX blast I'm used to.

Or better yet, don't create such problematic names in the first place when
creating your DVD.  And why aren't managed mounts the default?  Because
they slow down processing (which is already slow, since cygwin is an
emulation layer), and they reduce the already short maximum file name
limitations imposed by Windows.

- --
Don't work too hard, make some time for fun as well!

Eric Blake             ebb9@byu.net
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