Hi everybody:
I have come across an interesting problem with Cygwin's perl and rsync. If I
insert a data CD-ROM on drive R: , the following perl one-liner works fine:
perl -e 'if (-d "/cygdrive/r") { print "yes\n" } else { print "no\n" }'
That means, I get "yes" printed out. This one, however, does not (I get
"no"). The only difference is the "use strict;" at the beginning:
perl -e 'use strict; if (-d "/cygdrive/r") { print "yes\n" } else { print
"no\n" }'
Could you think of a reason why the "use strict;" at the beginning could make a
difference?
I hope someone can help confirm this problem, that would be enough for now. I
have reported this issue on perl 5 porters before, but got no confirmation, and
I was asked to post here, see this message:
http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl5.porters/2009/04/msg145767.html
I have seen this effect on a completely different machine, with Windows Vista
instead of Windows XP, and with rather different hardware. Note that I have
changed my CD-ROM drive letter from the default D: to R: (for Reader) with
Window's disk admin tool.
My other machine has a second W: (for Writer) drive. All my drives are from
manufacturer LG, some of them rather old, some pretty new. I have just tested
on another Windows XP (also German) with another brand of CD recorder / DVD
reader, and I still get the same problem. However, I have tested on a Spanish
Windows XP with LG drives, and that was fine (!).
I also had rsync refusing to copy files from the CD-ROM because the files were
"non-regular" (but the cp command does copy the files alright). Neither
"-device" nor any of the "--links-xxx" options would help. So I dug a little
deeper and realised that ls was reporting the files and directores as special,
block or character devices, see below. That is probably the reason why perl is
sometimes (but not always) having problems with that drive.
$ uname -a
CYGWIN_NT-5.1 MYMACHINE 1.5.25(0.156/4/2) 2008-06-12 19:34 i686 Cygwin
$ ls -la /cygdrive/r
total 4581112
br-------T 8910 285212672 3221225472 6656, 8897 Jan 15 1979 .
dr-xr-xr-x 1 0 root 0 Jan 1 1970 ..
cr-------T 8910 4286353920 1577058303 27004, 37376 Jan 15 1979 MD5SUMS.txt
cr-------T 8910 3934034145 3967586836 55296, 9281 Jan 15 1979
debian-40r1-i386-DVD-1.iso
Did you notice the 'b' and the 'c' at the beginning of the file listing?
This is the output from the test program on the post referenced above:
$ ./test.exe /cygdrive/r
Device Type : 2
Characteristics : 121
Volume Name : <Debian4.0r1>
Serial Number : 3707807536
Max Filenamelength : 255
Filesystemname : <UDF>
Flags : 80005
FILE_CASE_SENSITIVE_SEARCH : TRUE
FILE_CASE_PRESERVED_NAMES : FALSE
FILE_UNICODE_ON_DISK : TRUE
FILE_PERSISTENT_ACLS : FALSE
FILE_FILE_COMPRESSION : FALSE
FILE_VOLUME_QUOTAS : FALSE
FILE_SUPPORTS_SPARSE_FILES : FALSE
FILE_SUPPORTS_REPARSE_POINTS: FALSE
FILE_SUPPORTS_REMOTE_STORAGE: FALSE
FILE_VOLUME_IS_COMPRESSED : FALSE
FILE_SUPPORTS_OBJECT_IDS : FALSE
FILE_SUPPORTS_ENCRYPTION : FALSE
FILE_NAMED_STREAMS : FALSE
FILE_READ_ONLY_VOLUME : TRUE
FILE_SEQUENTIAL_WRITE_ONCE : FALSE
FILE_SUPPORTS_TRANSACTIONS : FALSE
I've also tried with other CD-ROM media to no avail.
I wonder under what circumstances would cygwin report CD-ROM directories and
files as special block/character devices..
Please cc me on the answer, as I'm not subscribed to this list.
Many thanks,
Ruben
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