duplicate *.exe commands

Atom Smasher atom@smasher.org
Thu Apr 9 04:15:00 GMT 2009


On Wed, 8 Apr 2009, Larry Hall (Cygwin) wrote:

> There are no duplicate *.exe commands.  All Cygwin executables contain 
> the exe extension as Windows prefers.  Cygwin tries to make things 
> easier by mapping "cat" to "cat.exe", for example, which is why it may 
> look to you like there are both in the Cygwin environment.  But look at 
> 'c:\cygwin\bin' in the Explorer and you'll see all the commands have the 
> .exe extension. If you get rid of one, you get rid of the other since 
> they are the same. Now, to anticipate your next question, 
> '/usr/bin/cat.exe' and '/bin/cat.exe' are not duplicates either.  See 
> the results of typing 'mount'.
=======================

i'm not talking about deleting any files, just deleting duplicate *.exe 
commands from my command hash, so they don't auto-complete when i press 
<TAB>. the *.exe commands would be there (and be available if called), i 
just wouldn't have to look at them when i tab-complete.

ls -ilh `which cat cat.exe`

that tells me that the two commands are hard-linked; they share the same 
inode. it seems the same way for all of the commands that appear in my 
PATH with and without a ".exe" suffix.

so the question remains: is it "safe" to delete all *.exe files from my 
command hash? or should i first check for the same command, in the same 
place, without the ".exe" suffix?


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