What is wrong with the name excel?

[Fergus Daly]

> Windows is odd ...

To those experiencing problems with
$ excel.exe
or, extraordinarily,
$ ./excel.exe
this question: what is your PATH within Cygwin?
Does it include inherited trajectories to Windows resources?
After experiencing many incongruities and unwelcome coincidences when I did not explicitly exclude default Windows pathnames (such as, typically, C:\Users\{yourname}\AppData\Local\Microsoft\WindowsApps but there are many others), I defined
PATH="$HOME/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/X11R6/bin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/usr/sbin"
in /etc/bash.bashrc (or your equivalent).
I just tested re-naming a working executable to "excel" within Cygwin, then called it, and the OS simply enacted the required same working executable with no visit or reference to the identically-named MS Office application; and no blank hang either as some have reported.
Dunno .. .. worth looking at in your own case?
Fergus    


-----Original Message-----
From: Cygwin [mailto:cygwin-bounces@cygwin.com] On Behalf Of Eliot Moss
Sent: 17 April 2020 19:26
To: Tony Richardson
Cc: cygwin
Subject: Re: What is wrong with the name excel?

Something that does work is to define a bash function name excel.  Within that
you could invoke an executable called myexcel, etc.  An alias probably works,
too.  Not sure about a symlink (and they come in different flavors).  But
these just paper over that weird special-ness.  Windows is odd ...

Best - Eliot