On Wed, Jun 9, 2010 at 12:39, Andy Koppe wrote: > On 9 June 2010 10:48, Julio Costa wrote: >>>>And this is where my head got reeeally spinning... can anyone, please, >>>>explain the reason to why this .exe magic exists, anyway? > > As far as I understand it, the original reason for it was that Windows > 9x always required it. Of course Cygwin 1.7 no longer supports 9x, so > from that perspective, it's no longer needed. >
That's how I see it too. > >>> [Running in cmd.exe] >> The point is, that *is not* a reason, because it is easily fixed by >> "set PATHEXE=%PATHEXE%:.". > > That's a nice one. I certainly didn't know about that. > > Explorer still needs the .exe though. Nope also. Try this at a cmd.exe: D:\ETC\Tools>assoc .=MyDefaultLauncher .=MyDefaultLauncher D:\ETC\Tools>ftype MyDefaultLauncher=%COMSPEC% /C "%1" MyDefaultLauncher=C:\WINDOWS\system32\cmd.exe /C "%1" D:\ETC\Tools>regtool set "/user/Software/Microsoft/Command Processor/AutoRun" 'set PATHEXT=%PATHEXT%;.' Now, try this in a Windows explorer: rename joe.exe (or vi.exe, or whatever...) to remove the extension. Now double-click it, and "voilá". DISCLAIMER: This is only a proof-of-concept. There are clearly some rough edges to remove, but this should give you the general idea... > More importantly, a lot of build scripts likely depend on the .exe being > added automatically. > Hm. Maybe they shouldn't. After all, the .exe magic has been around also so that kind of scripts DIDN'T needed that kind of expectations :) > The frequent questions and problems around this issue do make me > wonder though whether it wouldn't indeed be better to drop the .exe > magic completely, deal with the ensuing pain, but eventually be done > with it. > +1 from me. -- ___________ Julio Costa -- Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/ Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
