RE: bash builtin "test" kills bash on Win 2003 Server R2 x64 (some hardware)

["Stephen Quintero" <stephen at 3tera dot com>]

Thank you for your replies.  Some notes:

"[ -d /bin ]" causes the bash shell to terminate

"/bin/[ -d /bin ]" does not

"/bin/strace.exe [ -d /bin ]" does not cause the shell to terminate, spits out a lot of info, and exits 0x0.

If you refer to the original post by Brian Johnson (http://sourceware.org/ml/cygwin/2008-01/msg00579.html), all of the affects of "test", both builtin and external, which he noted also occur in my test.  I note that he also installed in a Xen VM.

He concludes that "it appears to be an issue with this particular Windows installation".  However, this is not my conclusion.  Why?  Because I have run the self-same VM (an exact block-level copy of the image) on two different sets of hardware, each running identical versions of Xen.  On one machine bash works, on the other it does not.

The problem seems specific to the hardware, or to the way Xen virtualizes the particular hardware (the VM is HVM - no paravirtualized drivers).  

Stephen



-----Original Message-----
From: tmcd@panix.com [mailto:tmcd@panix.com] 
Sent: Thursday, August 07, 2008 11:39 PM
To: cygwin@cygwin.com
Subject: Re: bash builtin "test" kills bash on Win 2003 Server R2 x64 (some hardware)

On Thu, 7 Aug 2008, Larry Hall (Cygwin)
<reply-to-list-only-lh@cygwin.com> wrote:
> But leaving that aside for the moment, perhaps you have a a
> corrupted '/bin/[.exe'.  Yes, it's just a WAG that really shouldn't
> be an issue but given your unique environment, maybe it's worth
> checking.

I don't have the original note handy, but I thought it was of the form
    if [ ... ]
As the subject line noted, [ is a shell builtin in bash (and I think
even in sh of recent decades), so I don't see how it could be affected
by corruption of anything other than /bin/bash.exe.

If the original code was
    if /bin/test ...
or
    if /bin/[ ... ]
then it would be likelier.

-- 
Tim McDaniel; Reply-To: tmcd@panix.com