Re: Git Bash Bug

From: Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schindelin@gmx.de>
Date: Jul 14, 2017, 21:52 UTC
Message-ID: <alpine.DEB.2.21.1.1707142345050.4193@virtualbox>
In-Reply-To: <1500066765.25789.111.camel@mad-scientist.net>

Hi Paul,

On Fri, 14 Jul 2017, Paul Smith wrote:

Show 17 quoted lines

> On Fri, 2017-07-14 at 22:33 +0200, Johannes Schindelin wrote:
> > > You absolutely have to have /bin and /usr/bin on your PATH,
> > 
> > As Kavita talks about Git Bash, it is probably Git for Windows, for
> > which /bin should not be in the PATH but /mingw64/bin or /mingw32/bin
> > (depending on the architecture).
> 
> I did check this with my Git for Windows installation before posting. 
> Mine is older (2.7.0) though so maybe things have changed:
> 
>   pds@build-win MINGW64 ~
>   $ type -a ls
>   ls is aliased to `ls -F --color=auto --show-control-chars'
>   ls is /usr/bin/ls
>   ls is /bin/ls
>   ls is /usr/bin/ls
>   ls is /usr/bin/ls

Oh wow ;-)

For the record, /bin/ is simply mapped to /usr/bin/. They are not different directories, really.

> Clearly I have a lot of duplicates on my PATH now that I notice :)

;-)

> I have /mingw64/bin on my PATH as well but looking there it has git,
> gettext, edit, a bunch of DLL's, etc. but it doesn't contain ls or
> other coreutils programs.

Right. The difference between executables in /mingw64/bin/ and in /usr/bin/ is that the latter executables all implicitly link to msys-2.0.dll, i.e. the POSIX emulation layer based on Cygwin. As you probably guessed: the coreutils are all compiled using that POSIX emulation layer.

Ciao, Johannes