Re: new modules 'open', 'fopen', 'freopen'

[Bruno Haible]

Daniel Jacobowitz wrote:
> It's a bug in open that it doesn't recognize a nonexistant device for
> a different system?

It's an interoperability problem that people report.

FWIW, perl does the same thing in its win32/win32.c file:

  DllExport int
  win32_open(const char *path, int flag, ...)
  {
    ...
      if (stricmp(path, "/dev/null")==0)
          path = "NUL";

> If I wanted to use a Windows version of gettext, I'd either use Windows
> paths or arrange for a shell which converted.

Other people do it differently. The report came from a user of VLC, and the
VLC makefile has a provision that when compiling in the Cygwin environment,
it compiles the package and assorted tool packages with "-mno-cygwin". So
you end up with mingw executables in a Cygwin environment (where the shell
does not have the automatic spawn/exec argument mangling, as Eric and Brian
explained).

The /dev/null came from a configure file. The configure file is running in a
Cygwin environment, therefore it is normal that "/dev/null" is being used and
not "NUL".

Bruno