RE: tcsh path conversion messed up? [was: strange shell output using tcsh under Cygwin]

["Lemke, Michael ST/HZA-ZIC2" <lemkemch at schaeffler dot com>]

On Tuesday, November 07, 2017 7:12 AM Brian Inglis wrote:
>On 2017-11-06 14:59, Will Parsons wrote:
>> Will Parsons wrote:
>>> I asked about what I thought was a shell scripting problem:
>>>    PATH=/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/c/Windows/system32:/c/Windows:/c/Windows/system32/wbem:/c/ProgramData/Oracle/Java/javapath:/c/Program:Files/Common:Files/Microsoft:Shared/Windows:Live:/c/Program:Files:(x86)/Common:Files/Microsoft:Shared/Windows:Live:/c/Program:Files/Dell/DW:WLAN:Card:/c/Program:Files:(x86)/Intel/iCLS:Client:/c/Program:Files/Intel/iCLS:Client:/c/Windows/System32/WindowsPowerShell/v1.0:/c/Program:Files/WIDCOMM/Bluetooth:Software:/c/Program:Files/WIDCOMM/Bluetooth:Software/syswow64:/c/Program:Files:(x86)/Windows:Live/Shared:/c/Program:Files:(x86)/Bazaar:/c/Program:Files:(x86)/QuickTime/QTSystem:/c/cygwin/home/william/bin:/c/ezwinports/bin:/c/Program:Files:(x86)/PuTTY:/usr/lib/lapack
>>>
>>> This doesn't look right, and would explain the strange shell output I
>>> reported.  (The value of PATH under bash looks normal.)  Did the installation
>>> of tcsh somehow get corrupted?  I don't remember a particularly recent update
>>> to tcsh.

How are you setting path? Do you have anything in your .cshrc/.login file? Most
likely, you are doing it wrong. 

>> 
>> Another bit of info - I just noticed that the value of the (t)csh shell
>> variable 'path' is:
>> 
>
>In csh, "PATH" is a standard Unix environment variable whose value is a colon
>separated directory list, and "path" is a shell wordlist kept synchonized with
>"PATH".
>To list the wordlist entries with embedded spaces in csh, quote the variable
>name with the :q modifier in a foreach loop wordlist, and you get the desired
>result as easily as in your sh script [trimmed and ...s redacted]:
>
>.......% foreach p ( $path:q )
>foreach?	echo $p
>foreach? end

And that is also key for setting path:

set path = ( ... $path:q )

I had this bug ($path instead of $path:q) for 20 years in my init files.