On Aug 23 10:33, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
> On Aug 22 18:49, Erik Bray wrote:
> > Hi folks,
> > 
> > I noticed a strange discrepancy when running Cygwin through mintty, vs
> > through a normal cmd.exe console.  This is on a build from the latest
> > git master, but also on Cygwin 2.8.0.  When run from a cmd.exe
> > console, we can see the following output from fhandler_dev::readdir:
> > 
> > $ ls -l /dev/con*
> > crw-rw-rw- 4 Erik M. Bray Erik M. Bray 3, 0 Aug 22 18:29 /dev/conin
> > crw-rw-rw- 4 Erik M. Bray Erik M. Bray 3, 0 Aug 22 18:29 /dev/conout
> > crw-rw-rw- 4 Erik M. Bray Erik M. Bray 3, 0 Aug 22 18:29 /dev/cons0
> > crw-rw-rw- 4 Erik M. Bray Erik M. Bray 3, 0 Aug 22 18:29 /dev/console
> > 
> > The same command when run in mintty returns:
> > 
> > crw-rw-rw- 1 Erik M. Bray Erik M. Bray 5, 255 Aug 22 18:29 /dev/conin
> > crw-rw-rw- 1 Erik M. Bray Erik M. Bray 5, 254 Aug 22 18:29 /dev/conout
> > crw-rw-rw- 1 Erik M. Bray Erik M. Bray 5,   1 Aug 22 18:29 /dev/console
> > 
> > In the latter case, the device numbers are the default device numbers
> > for /dev/console, etc.  In the former case, the inodes for
> > /dev/console, /dev/conin, and /dev/conout are set to the same as
> > /dev/cons0.  This logic can be found in fhandler_dev::readdir:
> > 
> > 203       if (cdev->get_major () == DEV_TTY_MAJOR
> > 204       && (cdev->is_device (FH_CONIN)
> > 205           || cdev->is_device (FH_CONOUT)
> > 206           || cdev->is_device (FH_CONSOLE)))
> > 207     {
> > 208       /* Make sure conin, conout, and console have the same inode number
> > 209          as the current consX. */
> > 210       de->d_ino = myself->ctty;
> > 211     }
> > 
> > where myself->ctty seems to depend largely on what file types the
> > stdio handles are attached to.
> > 
> > When running from cmd.exe, GetStdHandle(...) returns handles to a
> > character stream--i.e. the console itself.  However, when running from
> > mintty it returns pipes (specifically, to a pty, probably related to
> > the call to forkpty in mintty).  In Cygwin (particularly, in
> > dtable::init_std_file_from_handle) the result ends up being that when
> > the stdio handles are pipes, the /dev/cons0 device never gets created.
> > And thus /dev/console and friends never get rerouted to a real device.
> > This results in errors when trying to access /dev/console directly:
> > 
> > $ ls -l /dev/console
> > ls: cannot access '/dev/console': No such device or address
> 
> /dev/console is an old concept in Cygwin and it was always attached to
> the current console window, *if* you were running inside a windows
> console.  It was never implemented for pseudo ttys as used by mintty.
> 
> The fact that the /dev emulation shows the con devices is a bit
> disappointing, given that they are basically unusable.  The existence
> check only checks if GetConsoleCP() returns successfully, but that's
> true for a pseudo tty as well.  A console is attached to the process
> anyway.
> 
> I'll think about the existence check.

I checked in a patch removing the /dev/conin, /dev/conout and
/dev/console files from /dev if the process is not running from
a console.  Check out the latest developer snapshot from
https://cygwin.com/snapshots/


Thanks,
Corinna

-- 
Corinna Vinschen                  Please, send mails regarding Cygwin to
Cygwin Maintainer                 cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Red Hat