Date: Mon, 29 Mar 2010 11:19:37 -0500 (CDT)
From: Tim McDaniel <tmcd AT panix DOT com>
To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Subject: rxvt and mintty fail with SHELL=c:\bin\bash.exe
Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.4.64.1003291106100.1996@panix1.panix.com>
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I've used rxvt for many years, because I don't want to set up an X
server and I was able to do everything I want with it.  Since the last
update, if I clicked on my shortcut to rxvt, or ran it from cmd.exe,
it flashed open a window and then immediately closed it.  But I could
start "c:\bin\bash" with or without "-l" from cmd.exe.

I went to the mailing lists and saw the recent problem reports about
rxvt, "modified cygwin.bat for rxvt - window does not stay up in
1.7.2" (but I was already using a full path) and that rxvt does not
and will never understand Unicode.

So I decided to try mintty.  But IT also flashed up its window and
immediately closed it.

Bless the mintty developers who included the "-l, --log FILE" option.

     $ cat mintty.log
     exec: c:\bin\bash.exe: No such file or directory$

     c:\home\tmcdaniel>set | c:\bin\grep bash
     SHELL=c:\bin\bash.exe

SHELL is set in My Computer's system environment variables.  I don't
know why I set it in Windows syntax years ago.  I might guess that I
wanted to keep open the possibility of using %SHELL% in cmd.exe and
"$SHELL" in bash.

I changed SHELL to /bin/bash, and now both rxvt and mintty start up
fine.

I see that Cygwin is deprecating more strongly the use of
Windows-syntax filenames in Cygwin.  But Cygwin also deprecated a root
of c:\ and, frankly, I disagreed with that too.  This change broke a
system that had been doing what I wanted.  If Cygwin will generally
accept Window-style paths in shells and such, I think that it should
continue to accept them in SHELL too.

-- 
Tim McDaniel, tmcd AT panix DOT com

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