[Mingw-notify] [ mingw-Bugs-1251682 ] Strangeness when PATH unset or empty

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Bugs item #1251682, was opened at 2005-08-04 16:38
Message generated for change (Comment added) made by infidel
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Category: msys
Group: None
Status: Open
Resolution: None
Priority: 5
Submitted By: Max TenEyck Woodbury (mtew)
Assigned to: Earnie Boyd (earnie)
Summary: Strangeness when PATH unset or empty

Initial Comment:
While trying to track down some oddness with the shell,
I tried the 'check' target in the distribution package
as a general purpose diagnostic of how well MSYS and
bash met expectations.

On five occasions (in rapid succession) that test
produced dialog boxes to the effect that 'msys-1.0.dll'
was not available.  I wondered what caused that.

I think I have identified the situation and problem
that underlies this odd behavior.  That particular test
sets PATH to empty and this apparently confuses the
windows loader.  While this is only likely to happen as
a result of user stupidity or meanness, it should be
fairly easy to fix.  If PATH is empty, force a
temporary value of '/bin' into it so the .dll and basic
utilities can still be found.

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>Comment By: Luke Dunstan (infidel)
Date: 2005-08-06 14:05

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What is the advantage of doing this though? Why does the 
test set the PATH to empty, and what command fails? I think 
if PATH is empty it should do what it is documented and 
expected to do, which means not looking in /bin


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Comment By: Max TenEyck Woodbury (mtew)
Date: 2005-08-05 23:17

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OK,  I just needed to assure that I understood your decision
properly.

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Comment By: Earnie Boyd (earnie)
Date: 2005-08-05 22:18

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I gave you the location of where the patch needs to happen
in the MSYS runtime code.  It isn't a problem that bash
needs to deal with.

Earnie

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Comment By: Max TenEyck Woodbury (mtew)
Date: 2005-08-05 21:46

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Frankly, I do not yet know enough about the overall
structure of MSys to propose a definitive solution.  As I
understand it, the change to PATH does have to go in ahead
of the tranlation to DOS file names as you said, but that
might go either before or after the creation of the new
thread depending on how the code is structured.  It might
even be a good idea to make it a patch to 'bash'.  Once that
is decided, I will almost certainly be able to generate the
actual code change, if that is what you want me to do.

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Comment By: Earnie Boyd (earnie)
Date: 2005-08-04 19:32

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So your proposal is to test PATH for empty before spawn and
set it to a minimal string of ``/bin''?  This would need to
be done at the top of the spawn_guts function so that the
translation back to win32 paths work correctly.

Submit a patch to the patch tracker and I'll have a try at it.

earnie

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