On 03/12/2010 08:03 AM, Nellis, Kenneth wrote: > I wonder if there is more explanation available about how Cygwin > handles the .exe extension than I found in the User's Guide. > > http://cygwin.com/cygwin-ug-net/ > > I'm running 1.7.1. > In particular, I find it odd that moving a binary executable > toggles whether or not it has the .exe extension. Consider: > > $ ls -l > total 8 > -rwxr-x--- 1 knellis knellis 4096 2010-03-12 09:08 a.exe > -rwxr-x--- 1 knellis knellis 4096 2010-03-12 09:37 b > $ mv a c > $ mv b d > $ ls -l > total 8 > -rwxr-x--- 1 knellis knellis 4096 2010-03-12 09:08 c > -rwxr-x--- 1 knellis knellis 4096 2010-03-12 09:37 d.exe > $
This is an area of active conversation; if you would like, you can test the latest snapshot and the experimental coreutils 8.4-1 to see if the behavior is more intuitive (that is, there are more situations where .exe is preserved across file moves or copies, and fewer places where .exe is appended on a whim if the source didn't have one). In general, cygwin does not care if the .exe is missing, but other programs (particularly cmd) do, so it is better if PE-COFF files are given the .exe extension. But implementing it is tricky - for example, in the case of 'cat a > b', there is no way to tell at the time when b is created whether it will be populated with PE-COFF contents (that is, no way to tell whether the source was a literal 'a' or 'a.exe'), so you will not get an .exe in that case. > > I have a mixture of binaries with and without the .exe extension > and wonder if the mixture will somehow bite me one day. Hopefully not, but feel free to report any test cases where things need to be improved. -- Eric Blake ebl...@redhat.com +1-801-349-2682 Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org
signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
