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Re: PATHEXT is fundamental to Windows and Should be recognised by CYGWIN


Am 10.08.2016 um 03:01 schrieb Andrey Repin:

PATHEXT tells the shell to consider these file extensions executable.

No. That's what file associations do. cygstart will apply those where needed, so let's consider that aspect of the case closed, shall we?

PATHEXT has just _one_ job, in those few tools that even use it: it saves one the burden of referring to a file by its actual name. It's what makes a given command of just

	foo.bar

execute the first reachable one in this list


	foo.bar
	foo.bar.com
	foo.bar.exe
	foo.bar.bat
	foo.bar.cmd
	foo.bar.vbs
	foo.bar.vbe
	foo.bar.js
	...

in the current directory (unconditionally!), or the %PATH%.

So the only thing one has to do in order not to need PATHEXT support is to call all files by their full names, which a careful script programmer should always be doing anyway. So PATHEXT gains you nothing in well-written scripts.

That leaves the interactive command line as a possible use case to benefit from PATHEXT. I say Bash <Tab> completion runs circles around that any day.

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