Re: Unwanted .exe appended to symlinks

[Eric Blake <ebb9 at byu dot net>]

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According to fergus on 7/8/2005 9:43 PM:
> 	ln -s /cygdrive/c /c
> 	ln -s /cygdrive/f /f
> Following the recent upgrade to cygutils I find that the symlink is
> created as /c.exe not /c and /f.exe not /f in cases where the drive
> exists.

Confirmed.  Unfortunately, this is a side effect of my improvements to ln
to unify the cygwin-specific .exe code which tries to determine when the
original file exists as just "file" vs. "file.exe".  Inside normal
directories, the test is simple - check if "file." exists (since Windows
flattens the trailing .).  But for virtual filenames (such as /cygdrive,
/proc/registry, //server, or managed drives), the trailing . trick doesn't
work.  I really NEED a way to tell whether a file exists with exact
spelling, or had .exe appended, and you've found a place where the
trailing . trick is not cutting it.  Since ln, mv, and cp share my
cygwin-specific code now, I imagine it is probably easy to find a similar
bug in cp or mv.

Is there an easy way to tell if a filename resolves to a virtual mount,
instead of a disk file, and therefore know that the trailing . trick won't
work?

> Where it doesn't (e.g. it isn't plugged in but might be later so
> I am just preparing the way) then
> 	ln -s /cygdrive/h /h
> works as before: the symlink /h exists, and is not called /h.exe.

Hmm, I thought that a possible workaround might be using "ln -s
/cygdrive/h. /h", even when h exists.  It correctly created /h, supressing
the .exe extension, but now "stat /h" shows that the link has length 12
but only points to the 11 characters /cygdrive/h (in other words, cygwin
chopped the trailing dot from the link name, so it is reporting the wrong
length).  Furthermore, since /cygdrive/h. doesn't exist, the link is
useless without any indication that it is broken because of the invisible
trailing dot:

$ ln -s /cygdrive/d. d
$ readlink d
/cygdrive/d
$ stat d
  File: `d' -> `/cygdrive/d'
  Size: 12              Blocks: 1          IO Block: 1024   symbolic link
Device: d47c93feh/3564934142d   Inode: 50665495808013319  Links: 1
Access: (0777/lrwxrwxrwx)  Uid: ( 1007/  eblake)   Gid: (  513/    None)
Access: 2005-07-08 21:56:04.209000000 -0600
Modify: 2005-07-08 21:56:01.599625000 -0600
Change: 2005-07-08 21:56:01.599625000 -0600
$ ls d
d@
$ ls d/
ls: d/: No such file or directory

- --
Life is short - so eat dessert first!

Eric Blake             ebb9@byu.net
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