binary mode from non-Cygwin shells?

[Antony Courtney <antony at apocalypse dot org>]

I have read extensively the FAQ and User's Guide concerning binary and text
mode, and have now tracked down what I believe is a bug in Cygwin's behavior
(or, at least, a difference in behavior between what the User's Guide states and
what Cygwin actually does).   I am using the latest release of Cygwin (DLL
version 1.1.4), on Windows 2000, and have left the CYGWIN environment variable
undefined.

I get the following output from bash:

$ echo hello |od -c
0000000   h   e   l   l   o  \n
0000006

This looks right to me, since the User's Guide states:

	c. Pipes and non-file devices are opened in binary mode, except
	if the CYGWIN environment variable contains nobinmode.

and I have not set CYGWIN, and echo's stdout and od's stdin are connected to a
pipe.

However, if I run the same command from the Windows "Command Prompt"
(command.com), I see:

d:\users\antony>echo hello |od -c
0000000000     h   e   l   l   o      \r  \n
0000000010

which seems to be inconsistent with the User's Guide.  The User's Guide
(http://sources.redhat.com/cygwin/cygwin-ug-net/using-textbinary.html) states:

	[...] Non-Cygwin shells always pipe and redirect with binary mode.

I can, of course, do a "set CYGWIN=binmode" from within the "Command Prompt",
and then I'll get the same output from the Command Prompt as I do from bash, but
that's a somewhat clumsy solution (particulary for the case I'm interested in --
a non-Cygwin Windows application spawning Cygwin's OpenSSH ssh client using
ordinary Win32 API calls).

Any thoughts?  Is this a bug in Cygwin, a bug in the User's Guide, or am I just
confused?

	-antony

-- 
Antony Courtney  
Grad. Student, Dept. of Computer Science, Yale University
antony@apocalypse.org          http://www.apocalypse.org/pub/u/antony

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