Cygwin completion fails on mounted paths

Cygwin completion fails on mounted paths

[Bill Burton]

Hello,

I found the discussion earlier this month "ZSH DOS/Windows" rather 
informative.  This got me looking at some problems I've had using zsh as 
my default shell under Cygwin.  This is zsh 4.0.6 installed from a 
recent Cygwin setup.

$ uname -a
CYGWIN_NT-5.1 nbbillb 1.3.20(0.73/3/2) 2003-02-08 12:10 i686 unknown 
unknown Cygwin

The problem I'm having is that zsh refuses to complete on mounted paths:
$ mount
C:\cygwin\bin on /usr/bin type system (binmode)
C:\cygwin\lib on /usr/lib type system (binmode)
C:\cygwin on / type system (binmode)
C: on /c type system (textmode)

If I try to complete on /c/<C-D>, zsh just barks at me.  After some 
experimentation, I found the work around is to *not* set HOME to 
something that uses a mount.  But I want my HOME in a different place 
than the default that's based on HOMEDRIVE and HOMEPATH.

The following hack seems to work.  First in My Computer, Environment 
variables, I created a CYGWIN_HOME User variable set to 
/cygdrive/c/home.  Then, I modified /etc/zprofile adding the following 
after the USER="`id -un`" line:

# Get a specfic home directory
if [ -n "$CYGWIN_HOME" ]; then
   if [ -d "$CYGWIN_HOME" ]; then
     HOME="$CYGWIN_HOME"
   else
     echo "CYGWIN_HOME points to a non existant directory!"
   fi
fi

Then, I created a zygwin.bat script in my Cygwin root directory C:\cygwin:
   @echo off
   C:
   chdir C:\cygwin\bin
   zsh -l -i

So, I guess there's a bug in the completion and/or the way HOME is handled.

-Bill

RE: Cygwin completion fails on mounted paths

[Borzenkov Andrey]

> I found the discussion earlier this month "ZSH DOS/Windows" rather
> informative.  This got me looking at some problems I've had using zsh as
> my default shell under Cygwin.  This is zsh 4.0.6 installed from a
> recent Cygwin setup.
> 
> $ uname -a
> CYGWIN_NT-5.1 nbbillb 1.3.20(0.73/3/2) 2003-02-08 12:10 i686 unknown
> unknown Cygwin
> 
> The problem I'm having is that zsh refuses to complete on mounted paths:
> $ mount
> C:\cygwin\bin on /usr/bin type system (binmode)
> C:\cygwin\lib on /usr/lib type system (binmode)
> C:\cygwin on / type system (binmode)
> C: on /c type system (textmode)
> 
> If I try to complete on /c/<C-D>, zsh just barks at me.  After some
> experimentation, I found the work around is to *not* set HOME to
> something that uses a mount.  But I want my HOME in a different place
> than the default that's based on HOMEDRIVE and HOMEPATH.
> 

that is not strictly speaking Zsh fault. Zsh is using globbing when
completing file names and globbing does not return Cygwin mount points. Just
try

cd /
echo *

or simply

echo /*

[...]
 
> So, I guess there's a bug in the completion and/or the way HOME is
> handled.
>

The bug is in the way Cygwin treats own mount points. Zsh has workaround for
it:

fake-files
     This style is used when completing files and looked up without a
     tag.  Its values are of the form `DIR:NAMES...'.  This will add
     the NAMES (strings separated by spaces) as possible matches when
     completing in the directory DIR, even if no such files really
     exist.

     This can be useful on systems that support special filesystems
     whose top-level pathnames can not be listed or generated with glob
     patterns.  It can also be used for directories for which one does
     not have read permission.

So set it to

zstyle ':completeion:*:fake-files' /:'c d cygroot' /cygroot:'c d ...' ...
etc

(IIRC virtual root is called /cygroot).

If you come up with a script that parses mount table and automatically
creates this style we can add it to distribution so whoever packages Zsh for
Cygwin could use it in /etc/zshrc by default. I once intended to do it but I
do not use Cygwin now.

-andrey