Re: Unhelpful behaviour on Cygwin when "file" isn't installed

[Olly Betts]

On Tue, Feb 14, 2006 at 08:12:58PM -0600, Bob Friesenhahn wrote:
> On Tue, 14 Feb 2006, Ralf Wildenhues wrote:
> >* Olly Betts wrote on Tue, Feb 14, 2006 at 08:06:52PM CET:
> >>I tried to search for previous references to this issue, but it's pretty 
> >>much impossible to usefully search for "file"!  Sorry if this is
> >>rehashing old discussions.
> >
> >It's not really, but there is a very similar bug report and patch
> >outstanding (which I temporarily forgot about):
> >http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_id=9231830&forum_id=5119

The message (and problem) are similar, but that's about cross-compiling
to mingw rather than native building on cygwin it seems.  But a similar
patch would probably work for cygwin I guess.

> >Probably the issue can be solved to not use `file' at all, but I'd still
> >need to think about that.
> 
> At one time Cygwin used 'objdump' rather than 'file'.  Later it was 
> improved to use 'file' since file returns more accurate results.  For 
> MSYS/MinGW 'objdump' is still used because 'file' does not come with 
> MSYS.

The user who reported this to me says that cygwin doesn't come with
file by default either (he'd installed it very recently, so I guess
he probably has the latest release).  I'm a little suprised by this,
but don't have cygwin myself so I can't check if this really is the
case.

Cheers,
    Olly