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Re: Caveats for removing /cygdrive prefix?


On 7/22/2014 05:38, Matt D. wrote:
I've always used Cygwin's fstab /cygdrive default but I'm growing tired
of always typing it out; msys's simple "/a" "/c" "/d" prefix for drive
letters always seemed closer to home while on a Windows machine.

It's not clear to me from your message if you know this, but it's easy to get that behavior on Cygwin. Just change the cygdrive line in /etc/fstab to:

    none / cygdrive binary,posix=0,user 0 0

I've been running this way for many years now, and I have never traced any problem I've had with Cygwin to this practice.

The only problem I've encountered is a borked ls display when an actual
folder "a", "b", etc., appears in the Cygwin root folder

I can't think of a good justification for creating single-letter folder names at the top level of a volume, so this seems like a problem that isn't likely to come up.

the inability to enumerate drive with "ls /cygdrive".

I think that's actually a feature. Notice that "ls /" also doesn't include "cygdrive". If it did, you'd get duplicate entries in "find /" commands, the locate(1) DB, etc.

Also, it would be nice if doing a directory list on /cygdrive was a
hard-coded operation, to preserve this functionality.

That causes duplicate entries when you use the fstab solution.

For example, "find / -name sh.exe" would turn up both /bin/sh.exe and /c/cygwin/bin/sh.exe.

If the Cygwin filesystem naming scheme were perfect, you could say "find -name sh" and get the same results. And then if you demand that find(1)'s readdir() calls include both sh and sh.exe entries to fix this, now you've created another duplicate entry problem.

The Windows to POSIX translation will always be imperfect.

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