Re: MSYS - why does sending relative posix paths to some windows applications fail?

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On 2011-08-17 05:04Z, Alister Hood wrote:
>
> I was wondering if anyone could tell me why the first three of the
> commands below all work if I run them in the msys shell, but if I run
> the fourth explorer gives me the message "The path '../msys/test' does
> not exist or is not a directory." 
> 
> $ notepad .\\msys.bat
> $ notepad ./msys.bat
> $ explorer .\\msys
> $ explorer ./msys

Try it in CMD.EXE:

Microsoft Windows XP [Version 5.1.2600]
(C) Copyright 1985-2001 Microsoft Corp.

C:\Documents and Settings\Arktos>f:
F:\>cd msys

These all work:

F:\msys\1.0>notepad .\\msys.bat
F:\msys\1.0>notepad ./msys.bat
F:\msys\1.0>explorer ..\..\msys

But these fail:

F:\msys\1.0>explorer ..\\..\\msys
The path '..\\..\\msys' does not exist or is not a directory.

F:\msys\1.0>explorer ../../msys
The path '../../msys' does not exist or is not a directory.

> I've always had trouble with the path handling in msys, and it seems to
> come back to this.  I presume it isn't a problem with my specific setup?

It's reproducible without running the MSYS shell. Almost all msw programs
recognize '/' as a path separator as well as '\'; it seems that 'explorer'
does not (and doesn't like duplicated '\\' either).

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