/WINDOWS

[Corinna Vinschen]

Hi,

There are a bunch of applications, which, for security reasons, want to
set $PATH to a fixed value.  This approach is a bit tricky on Windows,
since the needed paths to the Windows system directories are not fixed
values as it's on POSIX systems.  A lot of applications are falling back
to values like _PATH_DEFPATH or _PATH_STDPATH and use them to set $PATH
before starting another application.  Sshd, login, cron are just three
of them.  The current patches to all three applications are so that the
code which sets $PATH before exec'ing another process is not executed
when built for Cygwin.

I think a better approach is this:  Let's generalize the idea of a fixed
path to the Windows system directories.  I suggest, that one of the base
install scripts creates a symlink "/WINDOWS" like this:

  ln -s `cygpath -m "$WINDIR"` /WINDOWS

This allows to keep the above described code to set $PATH in the
affected tools, just by redefining, say _PATH_DEFPATH like this:

#ifdef _PATH_DEFPATH
#undef _PATH_DEFPATH
#define _PATH_DEFPATH "/usr/bin:/bin:/WINDOWS/system32:/WINDOWS:/WINDOWS/COMMAND/WINDOWS/system32/Wbem"
#endif

which contains both, NT and 9x paths.  We could perhaps even change
/usr/include/paths.h to reflect this, at one point.


Opinions?

Corinna
-- 
Corinna Vinschen                  Please, send mails regarding Cygwin to
Cygwin Developer                                mailto:cygwin@cygwin.com
Red Hat, Inc.