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Re: less.exe v481-1 cannot seek to EOF in CRLF file; current cygwin32, Win10 only.
- From: "KARL BOTTS" <kdbotts at usa dot net>
- To: <cygwin at cygwin dot com>
- Date: Tue, 02 Feb 2016 17:57:09 -0600
- Subject: Re: less.exe v481-1 cannot seek to EOF in CRLF file; current cygwin32, Win10 only.
- Authentication-results: sourceware.org; auth=none
- Z-usanet-msgid: XID326uBBX6J2656X31
This is to close out my earlier bug report. I think it contains a useful
caveat for others.
I have a very old cygwin installation, which I propagate by updating it on one
machine via setup.exe, and then copying the whole c:/cygwin tree to several
other machines, with tar or rsync. I have not installed it from scratch for
well over ten years. After I updated from cyg1.7 to cyg2.3, I started having
various line-ending related problems, particularly from <bash> and <less>.
I reported that here under the subject line of this message, a week or so ago.
Helmut and Marco kindly tried to reproduce it, and failed. I inferred from
this that there was something wrong with my ancient installation. I
reinstalled from scratch on one machine, and the problems were gone. After
diffing and digging for awhile, I think I found the problem:
My old /etc/fstab, that had not been changed for years and worked under 1.7,
has one non-comment line:
none / cygdrive text,posix=0,user 0 0
The same file in the from-scratch install (after running 'mount -c /') has:
none / cygdrive binary,user 0 0
Also present in my (even more ancient) home dir, is a bash script containing
lines like:
mount -u -t --change-cygdrive-prefix "/"
mount -s -t --change-cygdrive-prefix "/"
Note that the -u, -s and -t options are not supported by cygwin <mount>
anymore. I dimly remember that, long ago, I would run that script after
copying to a new machine, but I have not done so for years.
So the upshot, I think, is this:
Cygwin _used_ to support the notion of mounting volumes with a "text" option,
which had some effect on how line endings were handled. I am not sure it was
ever valuable, and I don't remember why I did it, but apparently I did, long
ago.
Cygwin no longer really supports the "text" option (you could still set it
with mount -o, but I do not recommend that). Further, it is no longer needed,
if it ever was, which I doubt. And with it, some critical apps will suffer
line ending problems. So don't do that.
I think the Win10 business was a red herring.
Thanks for everyone's help and patience.
---
Karl Botts, kdbotts@usa.net
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