How does 'alternatives' find a file?

[Henry Baker <hbaker1@pipeline.com>]

I've had to create a cygwin tree from a circa 2011 tar dump, and I've had a devil of a time trying to make it work.

The biggest problem I have right now is that 'alternatives'-style symlinks don't work.

(The "!<symlink>"-style symlinks _do_ seem to work.)

After doing a lot of Google searching, I tried various combinations of

attrib +s gcc.exe

attrib +r gcc.exe

etc., to no avail.

I can make gcc.exe work by forcibly copying gcc-4.exe to gcc.exe, but there are probably thousands of such links that
would have to be set manually.

The best thing would be to understand how 'alternatives' finds its files, and fix that to correctly find all of the files.

I'm running from both NTFS and FAT32 file systems; neither one works.

I'm running Windows 7 on a 64-bit machine, if that matters.

Thanks for any help; I've now spent many hours trying to solve this problem.


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