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RE: faq: why doesn't tilde expansion work in shell scripts in cyg win?


Dan,

At 21:02 2002-08-24, Dan Kegel wrote:
Aha. I figured it out, and it looks like Cygwin's ash might not be posix compliant. Tilde expansion is required by Posix; see <http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007904975/utilities/xcu_chap02.html#tag_02_06_01>

Looking at the source for the ash used in Cygwin, it looks like tilde expansion is disabled! The Makefile.am in <http://programming.ccp14.ac.uk/ftp-mirror/programming/cygwin/pub/cygwin/release/ash/ash-20020731-1-src.tar.bz2> defines SMALL by default, which shuts off tilde expansion. That would explain my result (though not why tilde works from the ash commandline; curious).
Please explain "works from the ash commandline." I can see no circumstance in which tilde expansion is happening in ash.


Am I correct? It's a little suprising to find Cygwin doesn't use a Posix-compliant shell...
As I understand it, Cygwin includes ash specifically as a very-light-weight shell for scripting and makefiles. It's small size and minimal feature set gives it a low start-up time, which helps a lot when many of them get executed, for example when running make.


- Dan

Randall Schulz
Mountain View, CA USA


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