UNIX Desktop Questions & Answers

Hi there,

I ve been using cygwin for some time now without any problems. However, recently I ve mapped a new drive on Windows and are now having problems with TAB completion for awk scripts in cygwin on this newly mapped drive (cygdrive t). I can access and run all files but cygwin doesn't do TAB completion on any of these files.

For some reason the awk scripts are not executable on cygdive t either. I already tried changing it to chmod 777 but this is not working for whatever reason.

I ve already copied all awk scripts from drive t to one of the other cygdrives and miraculously TAB completion is working on them no probs.

I found some information about fstab on the Inet saying that you could treat all files below a certain mount point as executable but I do not seem to get this to work either.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!!!

Cheers
Tommes

Are you sure both file systems are mapped equally?

I think so; Basically just mapped them in Windows and usually cygwin just maps them als type system under cygdrive/drive_letter. They all appear as exactly that in the mount table at the moment....

I've found there's a few quirks and foibles with tab completion in Cygwin, even without involving string-parsing commands like awk, grep or sed. There are occasions, unpredictable and often inexplicable, when it will or won't work, and there have been times when I've had it work in a four- or five hour long session, logged out or closed my rxvt, come back an hour later and couldn't get a single tab to complete, even though my command syntax and patterns were indistinguishable from the ones I used in that long session only hours before.

I guess these are among the final side-effects of Bill Gates walking out of that legendary meeting with the IBM brass, having told them he was going with Windows 98 as his flagship product instead of NT. When even the best-intentioned developers try to fit a Unix skin on something that's bound to resist "wearing" the "monkey suit" of unadulterated POSIX/ISO at every turn, funny things are bound to happen. Let's not forget what cygpath -unix does to a string that describes a Windows path: the first thing it adds is /cygdrive/. That, from where I sit, is not Unix, will never be Unix, and just shows how many concessions, end-runs and workarounds the Cygwin coders had to resort to to get XP and Vista to "wear" the aforenamed "monkey suit."

But back to the topic of the thread.

If you don't get any further with this, chalk it up to the idiosyncrasies of both Cygwin and Windows and find something else to do, is my advice.

BZT
PS: Sorry to insinuate my mini-rant in your thread.

I have a fresh install of Cygwin 1.5.24 (on Vista enterprise). Using tab does not auto complete directories for me. Is there some Bash setup necessary for this to work?

You might want to read the above.