How to make Cygwin handle Unicode symbolic links?

[David Dyck]

I assume you meant  cygcheck
<https://cygwin.com/cygwin-ug-net/cygcheck.html>, not  symcheck ?
 ( i've been "into" symbolic links in cygwin today so the title caught my
eye )

what do you have for the CYGWIN environment variable,  I've been using
winsymlinks:native
eg
  export CYGWIN=winsymlinks:native

On Fri, Jan 3, 2025 at 11:58 AM Larry Martin via Cygwin <cygwin@cygwin.com>
wrote:

> I have two Cygwin systems, seemingly identical.  But one can compile
> openssl and one can't.  The problem occurs in the symbolic links that
> come with the source.  They all seem to be Unicode, or at least
> recognizeable ASCII characters with 0x00's in between.  Cygwin on my
> regular development system processes those symlinks just fine.  But on a
> second PC, Cygwin just sees the symlink as a file.  Per the
> instructions, the output of `symcheck -s -v -r` for both systems is
> attached.  Neither system has any environment variables starting with
> "LC_" or "LANG".
>
> In order to describe the problem, I have to use examples from openssl.
> Please remember that this is a Cygwin question, not gcc or openssl.  I'm
> also aware that my openssl version is quite old. There are reasons for
> that.  It doesn't affect this question.
>
> On the "bad" system, the first error is "stray '\377' in program" when
> gcc parses openssl/include/openssl/des.h.  That is a symlink to
> ../../crypto/des/des.h.  In my compile folder on the bad system, this
> happens:
> > $ head openssl-1.0.2p/include/openssl/des.h
> > !<symlink>??../../crypto/des/des.h
> Note that Cygwin did _not_ follow the symlink, but printed it out like
> any other file.
>
> On the "good" system, the same command goes more like this:
> > $  head openssl-1.0.2p/include/openssl/des.h
> > /* crypto/des/des.h */
> > /* Copyright (C) 1995-1997 Eric Young (eay@cryptsoft.com)
> >  * All rights reserved.
> where Cygwin _has_ followed the symlink.
>
> In emacs, the symlink in question looks like Unicode:
> > !<symlink>
> > .\0.\0/\0.\0.\0/\0c\0r\0y\0p\0t\0o\0/\0d\0e\0s\0/\0d\0e\0s\0.\0h\0\0\0
> It is the same on both systems.
>
> When I make a new symlink on either system, it is unreadable, so I can't
> dump it with any hex editor including od.  However, the file length
> seems to be about half that of the openssl source tree links, so it's
> probably UTF-8.
>
> The question is: what might be different between these two Cygwin/Win11
> systems, where one follows a Unicode symlink and the other doesn't?
>
> Thank you.
>
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