Re: [Mingw-users] How can I tell whether my prog is running on cmd.exe or bash?

[Keith Marshall <keithmarshall@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Saturday 09 February 2008 18:09, Paul Leder wrote:
> But, if Cygwin isn't in the path, and there's no
> reason that it should be, then it's pointless for me, or any program,
> to parse the path looking for a list of shells.

What absolute rubbish!  The *native* port of man, for MinGW, wants a 
Unixy shell to run the troff pipeline.  It gets that by searching the 
PATH, (internally, within a spawnlp call), and it *doesn't* require 
Cygwin to be the provider; it works perfectly well with any Unix shell 
it finds.

> In *Windows*?? I pick up PATH, on a Windows machine, search the
> entries, and find a program called ksh.exe? Surely it's not exactly
> prudent to execute that program, in the hope that it's a Korn shell?

Why not?  At least two of the toolkits I mentioned yesterday provide 
Korn shells, (one of them being the commercially produced MKS Toolkit), 
so I would have no qualms about assuming that ksh.exe is *exactly* what 
it appears to be -- a fully functional Korn shell.

> *Thats* why 'cygpath' is so useful. If cygpath understands /bin/sh,

Why bother with cygpath at all?  If...

  spawnlp( _P_WAIT, "sh", "sh", "-c", "'command to execute'", NULL );

(or the equivalent invoked directly by CreateProcess), executes as you 
expect, doesn't that give you sufficient confidence that the `sh' you 
found is satisfactory?  That removes the added overhead of the cygpath 
fork, *and* removes the explicit Cygwin dependency.

> then I can be almost ceratin that the return value is a proper shell.

Is it any more prudent to assume that cygpath.exe is what you think it 
should be, than to assume that ksh.exe is a Korn shell?  It could just 
as well be a trojan, which will wipe your hard drive.  You have to 
trust your users to adopt a sensible attitude to software installation; 
users who have *any* sort of Unix emulation software installed will 
DTRT here; those who don't are extremely unlikely to have anything 
named as a Unix shell, which isn't just that.

But, who cares anyway?  You are happy with your solution; I am happy 
with mine.  Further discussion would seem pointless.

Regards,
Keith.

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