When the Windows Store version of Python is installed, so-called "app execution aliases" are put into the `PATH`. These are reparse points under the hood, with an undocumented format.
We do know a bit about this format, though, as per the excellent analysis: https://www.tiraniddo.dev/2019/09/overview-of-windows-execution-aliases.html The first 4 bytes is the reparse tag, in this case it's 0x8000001B which is documented in the Windows SDK as IO_REPARSE_TAG_APPEXECLINK. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a corresponding structure, but with a bit of reverse engineering we can work out the format is as follows: Version: <4 byte integer> Package ID: <NUL Terminated Unicode String> Entry Point: <NUL Terminated Unicode String> Executable: <NUL Terminated Unicode String> Application Type: <NUL Terminated Unicode String> Let's treat them as symbolic links. For example, in this developer's setup, this will result in the following nice output: $ cd $LOCALAPPDATA/Microsoft/WindowsApps/ $ ls -l python3.exe lrwxrwxrwx 1 me 4096 105 Aug 23 2020 python3.exe -> '/c/Program Files/WindowsApps/PythonSoftwareFoundation.Python.3.7_3.7.2544.0_x64__qbz5n2kfra8p0/python.exe' Signed-off-by: Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schinde...@gmx.de> --- winsup/cygwin/path.cc | 24 ++++++++++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 24 insertions(+) diff --git a/winsup/cygwin/path.cc b/winsup/cygwin/path.cc index f3b9913bd0..63f377efb1 100644 --- a/winsup/cygwin/path.cc +++ b/winsup/cygwin/path.cc @@ -2538,6 +2538,30 @@ check_reparse_point_target (HANDLE h, bool remote, PREPARSE_DATA_BUFFER rp, if (check_reparse_point_string (psymbuf)) return PATH_SYMLINK | PATH_REP; } + else if (!remote && rp->ReparseTag == IO_REPARSE_TAG_APPEXECLINK) + { + /* App execution aliases are commonly used by Windows Store apps. */ + WCHAR *buf = (WCHAR *)(rp->GenericReparseBuffer.DataBuffer + 4); + DWORD size = rp->ReparseDataLength / sizeof(WCHAR), n; + + /* + It seems that app execution aliases have a payload of four + NUL-separated wide string: package id, entry point, executable + and application type. We're interested in the executable. */ + for (int i = 0; i < 3 && size > 0; i++) + { + n = wcsnlen (buf, size - 1); + if (i == 2 && n > 0 && n < size) + { + RtlInitCountedUnicodeString (psymbuf, buf, n * sizeof(WCHAR)); + return PATH_SYMLINK | PATH_REP; + } + if (i == 2) + break; + buf += n + 1; + size -= n + 1; + } + } else if (rp->ReparseTag == IO_REPARSE_TAG_LX_SYMLINK) { /* WSL symlink. Problem: We have to convert the path to UTF-16 for -- 2.30.2
