How to stop MinGW and MSYS from mangling path names given at the command line

Question

On Windows, I\'m cross-compiling a program for ARM/Linux using CodeSourcery\'s cross-compiler suite. I use MinGW MSYS as my command interpreter, and very often it will mangl

Answer 1

I don't think there's a way to switch this off. MSYS is a fork of an old Cygwin version with a number of tweaks aimed at improved Windows integration, whereby the automatic POSIX path translation when invoking native Windows programs is arguably the most significant. The trouble with that is that it isn't always possible to tell whether an argument is a path or something else, or whether, as in this case, it is in fact a path that nevertheless shouldn't be translated. The translation is guided by a set of heuristics.

You could try using MinGW make instead of MSYS make (yes, they're different things), which is a native Windows build of make without POSIX path support and conversion. Install with mingw-get install mingw32-make and invoke as mingw32-make.

Or you could try Cygwin, ideally with a Cygwin build of the toolchain.