1.5.24: data corruption problem with popen and gzip on a text mounted filesystem

[Hugh Secker-Walker]

Hi Folks,

I'm having trouble getting correct behavior on a third-party OpenSource 
project that I'm building using Cygwin.  The problem involves the 
writing of corrupt data to a file.  The output file is created and 
written via popen("gzip > outputfile", "wb").  The data is fine if the 
filesystem is mounted in binary mode.  The data is corrupted if the 
filesystem is mounted in text mode.

My understanding of the documentation is that pipes and shells' stdin 
and stdout will be in binary mode if the CYGWIN env variable contains 
the 'binmode' setting, regardless of the binary/text mount flag of the 
filesystem the file is mounted on.  From page 33 of the users guide:

    ...

    c. Pipes and non-file devices are opened in binary mode, except if
    the CYGWIN environment variable
    contains nobinmode.

        Warning!
        In b20.1 of 12/98, a file will be opened in binary mode if any
        of the
        following conditions hold:

            1. binary mode is specified in the open call
            2. the filename is a MS-DOS filename
            3. the file resides on a binary mounted partition
            4. CYGWIN contains binmode
            5. the file is not a disk file

    d. When redirecting, the Cygwin shells uses rules (a-e).  [sic, 
    should be (a-d) -HSW]
    For these shells the relevant value of
    CYGWIN is that at the time the shell was launched and not that at
    the time the program is executed.
    Non-Cygwin shells always pipe and redirect with binary mode. With
    non-Cygwin shells the
    commands cat filename | program and program < filename are not
    equivalent when filename
    is on a text-mounted partition.


I've generated a small example of the problem.  Attached is an annotated 
log showing the code and the behaviors.  One thing that is not clear 
from the logs is that I generally start all executables from within a 
bash shell within emacs.  However, the problem appears in rxvt shell 
windows and in XP cmd.exe windows in which I have run cygwin.bat to get 
a bash shell.

I've tried several workarounds of this variety:  " sh -c 'CYGWIN=binmode 
blah.exe' "  both to start the program and within the popen() command, 
but none of them has succeeded.  The use of "wb" or "w" in the second 
argument to popen() has no visible effect on the problem.  And the 
setting or not of CYGWIN=binmode in the XP environment has no visible 
effect.

So far I have no workaround to the problem.   I cannot require users to 
switch their filesystem mounts to binary.

Any insight or workarounds would be appreciate.

Thanks,
-Hugh




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