Re: rxvt and mintty fail with SHELL=c:\bin\bash.exe

[Paul Bibbings <paul dot bibbings at gmail dot com>]

Tim McDaniel <tmcd@panix.com> writes:

> 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.

In encountered exactly the same problem with minnty and with xterm
running under the XWin server immediately upon, (gratefully and eagerly!)
installing the update.  Like you, I quickly traced the problem
back to SHELL being set using a Windows path.  Initially I was also
unsure as the why I had set this at some unspecified time in the past
and was happy to change it to get mintty and xterm working again.

Later, however, I had to revert this decision since it, in turn, broke
my Gnus use of openssl (Cygwin). Even though I have cygpath installed in
my Emacs I couldn't get past what was clearly just the reverse problem
of what I had encountered in minnty and xterm with the update.

In the end I had to settle for retaining the Windows SHELL format and
setting a Cygwin path for each utility that now seemed to require it in
the appropriate .*rc file.  For now, this will have to do as the only
workaround I could enable quickly, since my work at present involves
mintty, xterm and email via Emacs and Gnus.  If this, or some other,
workaround means that I can have the best of both worlds, then the
decision to move away from Windows-style paths feels acceptable.  But it
is worth noting, from my experience, that there are nevertheless issues
of conflict with other non-Cygwin software that requires SHELL to be set
the `native' way. (To clarify, I am using GNU Emacs 23.1.1
(i386-mingw-nt6.0.6002, not the version from the Cygwin package.)

<snip />

Regards

Paul Bibbings


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