misterious GIT failure (SOLVED)

[matthew patton]

On Sunday, January 17, 2021, 02:41:35 PM EST, Brian Inglis <brian.inglis@systematicsw.ab.ca> wrote:
 
 > Sorry, it's been a few years now - there were a few issues testing various paths > using various directories and links that neither readlink nor realpath resolved 
> absolutely and correctly, so I added the cygpath to and fro to give a consistent 
> path to support ordering and duplicate checking.


I haven't run into a scenario yet where 'readlink' doesn't work. But I also don't intermix Windows with my Cygwin except in rare occasion. What IS absolutely NUTS is Cygwin's treatment of spaces in PATH elements - it magically escapes them but refuses to recognize escaped spaces; considers them invalid. All other environment variables spaces have to be treated properly. 
Cygpath also blows up spectacularly when you feed '-w/-m' anything that isn't a syntactically perfect unix-style (colon delimited) character string.