Greetings.
I apologize for the length of this post but I need to forestall advice
to try what has already failed. BTW, I have been posting this message to
various forums without any useful results. I'll try this newly
discovered newsgroup server.
I have a new Windows-7 64-bit box and Cygwin (1.75) was my first
download. At the installation stage, I included a2ps (4.13).
My problem: When I run it, I just get back to my shell prompt. This is
even when I run "a2ps -- version". Mystery?
First step: What is the exit code? echo $? displays 127. (errno.h tells
me this is related to sockets. Highly unlikely.) So I decided to run it
with strace:
$ strace -m all a2ps -- version
Well, that produced two error boxes at the Windows level.
The first had this title and message:
[a2ps.exe - No Disk]
There is no disk in the drive. Please insert a disk in drive
\Device\Harddisk4\DR4
[Cancel] [Retry] [Continue]
No matter which button I click, I get another error box with this title
and message:
[a2ps.exe - Application Error]
The application was unable to start correctly. (0xc0000013)
Click OK to close the application
Note that I got no terminal output from strace/a2ps itself - it never
got around to executing any service calls.
Searching the Cygwin User Guide, I found some information on page 59:
/dev/sda \device\harddisk0\partition0 (whole disk)
/dev/sda1 \device\harddisk0\partition1 (first partition)
...
/dev/sda15 \device\harddisk0\partition15 (fifteenth partition)
/dev/sdb \device\harddisk1\partition0
/dev/sdb1 \device\harddisk1\partition1
[up to]
/dev/sddx \device\harddisk127\partition0
/dev/sddx1 \device\harddisk127\partition1
...
OK, by this convention, \device\harddisk4\partition4 would be:
/dev/sde4. My scheme, suggested in the user guide, was to create a symlink:
$ ln -s /cyndrive/c/scratch /dev/sde4.
This has a few problems:
- The error message was about \Device\Harddis4\DR4 - differences
in case (possibly irrelevant)
- Different device name (DR4 as opposed to partition4).
- The "file" exists:
$ file /dev/sde
/dev/sde4: block special
(That running ls -l against /dev shows only directories mqueue
and shm - none of the device files - is a subject for another
thread.)
Trying to compile a2ps 4.14 myself gave me a compiler error after a
loooong process. The basic error message was:
In file included from path-concat.c:30:
/usr/include/string.h:58: error: parse error before "void"
This involves macros defined in _ansi.h:
_PTR _EXFUN(mempcpy,(_PTR, const _PTR, size_t));
(I'll stop this exploration for now - it's getting too hairy.)
Other things I have tried:
- Running the Cygwin/Bash window and a2ps in administrator mode.
- Running them both in XP compatibility mode.
Same result, different try.
All this leads me to suspect that a2ps, and perhaps some other packages
in the Cygwin family, were not actually compiled under Windows 7,
leaving *some* fatal incompatibilities in place.
Clues? Ideas? Thoughts?
Thanks much!