Lloyd Wood wrote: > I've just discovered that Cygwin does not preserve filenames ending in > a period, and treats the filenames with and without the period as > identical. This is contrary to other linux systems. > > http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/L.Wood/software/SaVi/building-1.2/ > > describes the problem; a file named 'Makefile_defs.' was created by > cvs, but eventually got packaged up as 'Makefile_defs' causing build > errors on platforms other than Cygwin.
Because It's Windows(tm). If I recall correctly the lowest level NT APIs can create filenames with trailing dots on NTFS volumes, but none of the higher level APIs (win32) can deal with a trailing dot. The Microsoft platform SDK in the section "Naming a File" in the Storage reference says: "Do not end a file or directory name with a trailing space or a period. Although the underlying file system may support such names, the operating system does not. " I think that Cygwin does use the NT level API for several reasons (speed and capability), but if it were to allow trailing-dotted filenames it would mean that you could create a file in Cygwin that would be undeleteable/unaccessable with normal windows tools. It would also create a behavior that would only work on NT kernels and NTFS filesystem, while Cygwin in general has to support 9x, FAT, etc. You should look into using a managed mount if you absolutely must have files with names that are incompatible with Windows. Brian -- Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/
