shell expansion produces e.g. "ls: cannot access '*.pdf': No such file or directory" in Windows CMD shell, but works okay in bash

[Jay Libove]

Hi Andrey,
(I have no idea what you mean about "top posting".)

`locale` gives the same in CMD as in bash, on this machine as on another machine on my network where I also checked, which also exhibits the same globbing problem under Windows CMD:

LANG=
LC_CTYPE="C.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="C.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="C.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="C.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="C.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="C.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=

Aha, wait! No, there is one difference: in Cygwin Terminal (which I've never run before today; I've always either just run commands in a CMD window, or run bash.exe first; I'd initially mistakenly assumed that Cygwin terminal was the same as bash-in-CMD, but clearly it's not):
LANG=en_US.UTF-8

If I set LANG=en_US.UTF-8 in a Windows CMD window, **then the globbing problem goes away**.

I'm not sure how that points towards a solution, but it certainly must be a clue.

thanks,
Jay


-----Original Message-----
From: Andrey Repin <anrdaemon@yandex.ru> 
Sent: Monday 23 March 2020 18:44
To: Jay Libove <libove@felines.org>; cygwin@cygwin.com
Subject: Re: shell expansion produces e.g. "ls: cannot access '*.pdf': No such file or directory" in Windows CMD shell, but works okay in bash

Greetings, Jay Libove!

Please no top posting in this mailing list.

> Good suggestion, deleting files one by one. It's not just one file, 
> but it does seem to have something to do with some file name patterns.
> I think I've got it. It's accented characters.
> I live in Spain. Spanish has accented characters such as "Asociación".
> When I remove all files containing any accented character in their name, the problem goes away.
> So the theory now is that the Cygwin argv-processing code has a problem with áccented charàcters ...

Compare the output of `locale` in Cygwin terminal and your regular console.
Most likely your files have names that do not map cleanly to your console codepage, or locale is not set in the native terminal.


--
With best regards,
Andrey Repin
Monday, March 23, 2020 20:40:57

Sorry for my terrible english...