Comments on: Windows-Friendly Cygwin Paths

By: Andy

Andy — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 14:44:19 +0000

All fair points.

By: derekgreer

derekgreer — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 13:10:06 +0000

@Andy I stand corrected. This works as long as the paths you’re referencing are on the same drive as the one you’ve installed Cygwin in the root of, but this wouldn’t suffice if expanding relative paths for another drive (e.g. developing in X:/Projects/). In this case, you’d still need to follow the approach outlined here. This also isn’t going to be a practical option for people already using Cygwin, as most wouldn’t want to reinstall/copy all there files over for this purpose.

Interesting find, but ultimately my recommendation would still be to set up an explicit mapping in the mount table to avoid the consequences that installing Cygwin in the root would lead to.

By: derekgreer

derekgreer — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 11:26:04 +0000

@Eric Yeah, that works if you don’t mind writing Cygwin-specific scripts, but when working on a team where not everyone uses Cygwin or for any open source build scripts this isn’t a viable option.

By: Andy

Andy — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 08:24:03 +0000

No, it would be at /Projects, alongside /bin, /usr, /Windows, /Users, … .

By: Eric Smith

Eric Smith — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 06:27:24 +0000

A neat trick. I just do a $( cygpath -w ) when calling out to Windows apps though.

By: derekgreer

derekgreer — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 00:55:49 +0000

Where Cygwin gets installed wouldn’t affect the default mount table settings. If you were to install Cygwin in the root then you’d still find that working in C:/Projects would resolve to /cygdrive/c/projects.

By: Andy

Andy — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 22:08:35 +0000

You could also just install Cygwin into C:\, thereby making / identical to C:\. Advantage: easier mental switching between Cygwin and Windows paths. Disadvantage: Unix and Windows directories get mixed up at the top level (although that’s quite similar to what you’d get on a Mac), and you have to trust the Cygwin package maintainers not to accidentally clobber something in the Windows directories.