Re: [h-e-w] External utilities (Was: Cant run ediff)

[Dr Francis J. Wright]

Syver Enstad wrote:
> 
> Joe Riel <address@hidden> writes:
> 
> > Francis (or anyone)
> >
> > >The latest Cygwin ispell is available via the Cygwin external porters
> > >link, and seems to work OK with Emacs.
> >
> > Do you have a URL where this exists? Pierre Humblet's cywin port,
> > which I guess is what you are referring to, does not exist at the URL
> > where several sites say that it should.

According to the README file, it is available from

http://www.hirmke.de/software/develop/gnuwin32/cygwin/porters/
Humblet_Pierre_A/V1.1/ispell-3.2.06-cygwin-1.3-bin.README

(re-join the broken line above) and the pre-compiled binary that I used
(including British and American dictionaries) is available from

   - package availability
     - on ftp.uni-erlangen.de
     - in /pc/gnuwin32/cygwin/porters/Humblet_Pierre_A/V1.1
     - as ispell-3.2.06-cygwin-1.3-bin.tar.gz

That's more or less where I got them from, although I don't remember the
precise details.  In case anyone still has difficulty getting it, I have
put the package on my server in the directory

http://centaur.maths.qmw.ac.uk/tmp/ispell-3.2.06/

> In my experience, you don't need the cygwin port to use the cygwin
> tools. Most of the cygwin tools are designed to work fine under
> windows, you don't need to run them under bash. You just install
> cygwin, and then either hardlink the files to a directory in your path
> or set your path to include cygwin\bin.

Yes, I think you only need cygwin1.dll to run a program such as ispell,
although you need tar and gunzip to instal it (as for Emacs itself, of
course).  [Incidentally, I recommend using the z option to tar rather
than explicitly including gunzip in a pipeline.]

> The only problem I've had was that some tools are somewhat picky about
> paths with spaces, and that windows already supplies a tool named
> find. The resolution to that was that I hardlinked the GNU find to
> gnufind and changed the name of the find program variable in emacs to
> gnufind. Another solution could be to use a batch file.

Or you can just put Cygwin at the front of your path, provided you don't
want to use anything like MS find from a command line (which generally I
don't).

> PS: Hardllinks only work on os'es that have the NT kernel, and are easiest to 
> implement under win2k, (the win32 api has a separate function for creating 
> hardlinks.)

The Cygwin ln program supports hard links if they are available and
simply copies otherwise, and I *think* Emacs does the same.  [If the
link count displayed by ls (or ls-lisp) is greater than 1 then the file
is hard linked.]  However, I was hoping that Windows XP would provide
some facility at the GUI level to access hard links, but so far I
haven't found it.  Does anyone know whether such an interface exists in
Win 2K or XP?

Francis