Re: GNU Emacs windows dired mode on binaries from cygwin

[jasonr (Jason Rumney)]

Balaji Venkataraman <bvenkata+nospam@sm.intel.com> writes:

> I'm not sure whether this is the right place for this question. I have
> cygwin (which has it's own different installation of Emacs 21.2.x). I also
> have Emacs 21.3 (the standalone M$ Windows version) installed *separately*.
> 
> These are with the Windows version of Emacs only:
> 
> 1. When I use dired mode to list /cygwin/usr/{bin|lib} (I've made sure this
>    dir exists etc.) - this is on Win2K - emacs does not display *any*
>    files. The dired buffer just has ./ and ../ listed. Is this expected
>    behavior.

This is expected behaviour if all you did was made sure the directory
exists. If you made sure that it contained some files, then you would
expect to see more. Be careful how you "make sure". If you use cygwin
to make sure, then you might be fooled by its mount points.

> 2. Another related question. Can the Windows only version of emacs, execute
>    cygwin binaries.

Yes. Despite what the cygwin documentation might lead you to beleive,
most cygwin binaries work perfectly well outside of the cygwin
environment, as long as cygwin.dll is on your path or in the same
directory as the binary you are running.

>    In other words when I invoke "M-x shell" I want it to run
>    /usr/bin/bash.exe instead of cmd.exe

It is usually safer to include the drive letter on Windows. Even if
you only have one hard drive, you might occasionally want to open a
file on a CDROM or floppy in Emacs, in which case the current drive
might become something other than C:, and /usr/bin/bash.exe will
refer to something other than c:/usr/bin/bash.exe