Re: DOS path

[John Poltorak]

On Thu, Feb 14, 2002 at 01:31:06PM +0100, Tim Van Holder wrote:

> > > I wouldn't go that far; autoconf currently supports ';' as pathsep
> > > just fine.  And in "most" places, I think it also handles a \ as dirsep.
> > > 
> > > However, there will probably be places where a path is (accidentally)
> > > echoed or passed unquoted (e.g. subdir configuration is one of those,
> > > IIRC), causing the backslashes to be expanded as escaped characters.
> > 
> > I have just discovered that KSH interprets '\b' as a backspace, so when 
> > attempting to convert c:\usr\bin, the result comes out as c:/usin. I'm 
> > trying to work out the best way of dealing with this.
> 
> try something like
> 
>   PATH=`echo $PATH |tr '\\\\' '/'`
> 
> should work fine; if your echo is broken and expands escapes by default,
> there's probably an option to inhibit it (seems like that's 'echo -E'
> for ksh).


Yes, I have this line (with -E) in config.site, but config.log shows:-


PATH: c:\us in
PATH: c:\emx in
PATH: c:\usr\loca in
PATH: c:\os2
PATH: .


The embedded space is really a x'08', so I guess the translate is done 
after the path is determined, although I don't know what significance this 
has.
 
> > > So while it _shouldn't_ be a problem (and any such problems should still
> > > be posted here; if we can trivially support this, I believe we should),
> > > I would indeed recommend flipping PATH slashes for autoconf (e.g. in
> > > config.site).
> > 
> > I didn't think autoconf itself used config.site...
> 
> I didn't think autoconf itself had a problem; it's a perl script that
> runs m4, so any issues are most likely a bug in the Perl/M4 ports and/or
> the libc used (in the case of system() calls).
> Any special handling would normally only be needed in configure scripts
> produced by autoconf, not in autoconf itself.  So config.site is the
> right place to do that.

What I meant was that I didn't think autoconf derives anything from 
config.site... If I put PATH=`echo $PATH...` in config.site, it 
won't make any difference to autoconf. It would be preferable if it did 
so.


-- 
John