activestate perl on cygwin

[Andrew DeFaria]

Kevin T Cella wrote:
> I don't actually install through cygwin, but use the ppm installer 
> from Activestate. 
Why people would want to use a proprietary Perl with a proprietary 
installer is beyond me. Let me ask you a question, what happens when you 
call setsid in this ActiveState Perl? Anyways...
> I still need to know how to solve the issue that occurs with the 
> command I mentioned in my original post. Using the version of perl
> installed with cygwin is not really an option since I already have 
> scripts written that utilize windows specific modules.
I betcha there are Cygwin versions of those "windows specific modules"...

Best way to think of things IMHO, is either go totally into Cygwin or 
get totally out of Cygwin, WRT Perl. Said differently, if you're gonna 
be using Activestate Perl then start a cmd shell!

I'm not sure I agree with your script's premise which states in the 
comment "Cygwin passes 'cygwin style' paths to the program in the #! 
statement". I don't believe that is true. Cygwin passes what you specify 
at the command line. Cygwin doesn't really know, for example, given a 
"myperlscript.pl foo/bar" whether "foo/bar" is supposed to represent a 
path or just a set of characters. That's for your Perl script to decide 
and act upon. Of course if you are giving "cygwin style" paths on the 
command line then I'd expect them to come in in that manner. Stated 
differently, if you type "myperlscript.pl /cygdrive/d/foo.dat" then I'd 
expect /cygdrive/d/foo.data. Perhaps you should instead specify 
"myperlscript.pl D:\\foo.dat"?

If you are saying that you like using the Cygwin bash prompt and like 
using say file name completion to help specify file paths to ActiveState 
Perl scripts then I would suggest this: Make your ActiveState Perl 
script aware that arguments it has that represent file paths may be 
coming in as a Cygwin path and have it convert the path to a Windows 
path in the Perl script. When I write Perl scripts I tend to write them 
so that they work on Linux/Unix and Windows using Cygwin or just plain 
Windows (and where possible totally neutral) and I usually leave open 
the possibility that a file path may be of Unix or Windows style and act 
accordingly.

-- 

Andrew DeFaria <http://defaria.com>
A good scapegoat is almost as good as a solution.


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