RE: /WINDOWS

["Morrison, John" <John dot Morrison at uk dot experian dot com>]

Igor Pechtchanski wrote:
> On Mon, 8 Dec 2003, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
> 
>> Hi,
>> 
>> There are a bunch of applications, which, for security reasons, want
>> to set $PATH to a fixed value.  This approach is a bit tricky on
>> Windows, since the needed paths to the Windows system directories
>> are not fixed values as it's on POSIX systems.  A lot of
>> applications are falling back to values like _PATH_DEFPATH or
>> _PATH_STDPATH and use them to set $PATH before starting another
>> application.  Sshd, login, cron are just three of them.  The current
>> patches to all three applications are so that the code which sets
>> $PATH before exec'ing another process is not executed when built for
>> Cygwin.  
>> 
>> I think a better approach is this:  Let's generalize the idea of a
>> fixed path to the Windows system directories.  I suggest, that one
>> of the base install scripts creates a symlink "/WINDOWS" like this:
>> 
>>   ln -s `cygpath -m "$WINDIR"` /WINDOWS
>> 
>> This allows to keep the above described code to set $PATH in the
>> affected tools, just by redefining, say _PATH_DEFPATH like this:
>> 
>> #ifdef _PATH_DEFPATH
>> #undef _PATH_DEFPATH
>> #define _PATH_DEFPATH
> "/usr/bin:/bin:/WINDOWS/system32:/WINDOWS:/WINDOWS/COMMAND/WIN
> DOWS/system32/Wbem"
>> #endif
>> 
>> which contains both, NT and 9x paths.  We could perhaps even change
>> /usr/include/paths.h to reflect this, at one point.
>> 
>> Opinions?
>> Corinna
> 
> FWIW, I agree that it's a good idea to have a fixed pointer to the
> windows directory, but I don't think "/" is the right place to have
> it.  Could we make it "/mnt/WINDOWS" or "/opt/WINDOWS" or something? 
> I don't like cluttering up the root directory unnecessarily...

I like the /mnt idea :)
I'd also like it to have /cygdrive/[insert drive letter here]/
as /mnt/[insert drive letter here]/ too (possibly instead of?)

J.

PS, I know I can change what /cygdrive is refered to as.


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