This is the mail archive of the cygwin@cygwin.com mailing list for the Cygwin project.


Index Nav: [Date Index] [Subject Index] [Author Index] [Thread Index]
Message Nav: [Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next]

Re: Problems with illegal characters in Pathnames


Corinna Vinschen wrote:
> 
> On Thu, Apr 19, 2001 at 03:31:04PM +0200, Ralf Habacker wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I'm porting applications for Windows (using X11 and KDE) and one often
> > recognized problem is that application using
> > the content of the DISPLAY environment variable to generate filenames
> > directly. Under Windows character ':' and some other aren't allowed for
> > filenames, so this applications will fail on running.
> >
> > I've found a function "mount_info::conv_to_win32_path" in the cygwin
> > library. Is it possible, that this function can convert illegal filename
> > characters to valid ?
> 
> No, it doesn't. This is a long lasting discussion and currently
> there's no agreement due to several pros and cons.
> 
> If you really want that functionality, write your own wrapper
> functions which convert POSIX paths to POSIX paths minus invalid
> DOS chars.

IMO, your apps are broken, not cygwin.  A "portable" program should use
portable filenames.  Therefore, your X11 app should mangle the DISPLAY
environment variable itself to generate an acceptable filename -- on all
supported platforms.

--Chuck

--
Want to unsubscribe from this list?
Check out: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple


Index Nav: [Date Index] [Subject Index] [Author Index] [Thread Index]
Message Nav: [Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next]