[CLN-list] Re: CLN vs weird mixture of Cygwin and MinGW

[Richard Haney]

--- Sheplyakov Alexei <varg at theor.jinr.ru> wrote:
[...]
> On Tue, Aug 15, 2006 at 06:39:44PM -0700, Richard Haney wrote:
[...]
> > Among the executables (".exe"s as well as scripts) in /bin and in
> > /cygdrive/c/Dev-Cpp/bin , the only ones that could clash are the
> > two versions of rm.exe that I mentioned.  The /usr/bin and
> > /usr/local/bin directories are not used.
> In fact, some tools from that directories *are* used, (e.g.
> /usr/bin/install)

You're right.  In fact, /usr/bin and /bin map to the same directory,
namely, "C:/cygwin/bin".  I was confusing /usr/bin with
"C:/cygwin/usr/bin", which is not used.

But now I'm puzzled as to why both /usr/bin and /bin map to the same
directory and why they are both listed in my PATH variable.  I
evidently retained these from the original installation default for
cygwin.  The file "C:/cygwin/etc/profile.default" for the bash shell
says:

PATH="/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:$PATH"

Also,

"mount -m" output is

mount -f -u -t "C:/cygwin/bin" "/usr/bin"
mount -f -u -t "C:/cygwin/lib" "/usr/lib"
mount -f -u -t "C:/cygwin" "/"
mount    -t --change-cygdrive-prefix "/cygdrive"

(I am pretty sure the mount points are the original ones provided by
installation default, except perhaps I may have unset some of them and
found that I couldn't reset them as "type system" and so reset them as
"type user".  At least this scenario (the possible resetting as "type
user") seems to be suggested by the description of the "mount" command
in Cygwin's online "Cygwin User's Guide", where these same mount points
are shown as "type system" rather than "type user".  But I just tried
setting 'mount -f -s -t "C:/cygwin/usr/local/etc" "/usr/wacky"' and
seemed to encounter no problem.)

I suppose the two different mount points "/usr/bin" and "/" as well as
the resulting redundancy in the PATH directories may be a holdover from
some old standard unix conventions.  

So I haven't bothered to change these or to do any "clean up" for
concern that I might ignorantly break something that depends on old
unix conventions.

Does anyone know what these conventions are all about and what might
get broken by changing them?

I didn't find anything in the various cygwin documents on this, but the
cygwin installation's "bash.html" does say that a common value for PATH
is /usr/gnu/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/ucb:/bin:/usr/bin:..

(I surmise that the last "." might be a . ending the sentence and
should not be a part of the PATH value.)

Best regards,

Richard


__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around 
http://mail.yahoo.com