Re: cygpath and star character

[Tomas Jura <tomas.jura1@gmail.com>]

Hi

My use case is building the CLASSPATH environment variable for java. Like:

export CLASSPATH="${CLASSPATH}${PATH_SEPARATOR}$(cygpath -w 
'my/java/jar/directory/*' )"

CLASSPATH can contain the star character at the end on Windows. Example 
C:\Apps\java\lib\* , which means something different then just 
C:\Apps\java\lib, ie. the star is necessary there.

Tomas

  14. 07. 21 v 21:26 Ken Brown wrote:
> On 7/14/2021 4:10 AM, Tomas Jura via Cygwin wrote:
>> Hi
>>
>> I found a strange behaviour of the program cygpath program
>>
>> 0 >cygpath -w "./*/*"           <--- IMHO wrong output
>>   \
>>
>> 0 >cygpath -w "./*/*"  | od -a                   <--- a detailed dump
>> 0000000   o nul   *   \   o nul   *  nl
>> 0000010
>
> What you're seeing here is a consequence of the way Cygwin handles 
> valid POSIX file names that contain characters (like '*') that are not 
> allowed in Windows file names.  See "Forbidden characters in 
> filenames" at
>
>   https://cygwin.com/cygwin-ug-net/using-specialnames.html
>
> Internally, Cygwin converts "./*/*" to the wide char string L"*\*" 
> with '*' replaced by 0xf02a.  This then gets converted to the 
> multibyte sequence in your "detailed dump", which is not quite 
> detailed enough:
>
> $ cygpath -w "./*/*"  | od -b
> 0000000 357 200 252 134 357 200 252 012
> 0000010
>
> I tend to agree that this is not desirable behavior.  I doubt if users 
> of 'cygpath -w' expect to get a result that contains transformed 
> forbidden characters.  But maybe there's a use case for this that I'm 
> missing.  Corinna?
>
>> 0 >cygpath -wp "./*/*"         <-- but this works as expected
>> *\*
>>
>> Is this bug or expected behavior ?
>
> It looks to me like a bug that 'cygpath -w' and 'cygpath -wp' give 
> different results on a path that doesn't contain a colon.
>
> Ken