Daniel Jacobowitz wrote: > It's a bug in open that it doesn't recognize a nonexistant device for > a different system?
It's an interoperability problem that people report. FWIW, perl does the same thing in its win32/win32.c file: DllExport int win32_open(const char *path, int flag, ...) { ... if (stricmp(path, "/dev/null")==0) path = "NUL"; > If I wanted to use a Windows version of gettext, I'd either use Windows > paths or arrange for a shell which converted. Other people do it differently. The report came from a user of VLC, and the VLC makefile has a provision that when compiling in the Cygwin environment, it compiles the package and assorted tool packages with "-mno-cygwin". So you end up with mingw executables in a Cygwin environment (where the shell does not have the automatic spawn/exec argument mangling, as Eric and Brian explained). The /dev/null came from a configure file. The configure file is running in a Cygwin environment, therefore it is normal that "/dev/null" is being used and not "NUL". Bruno