Re: Access windows environment variable via cygwin

[Eliot Moss <moss at cs dot umass dot edu>]

On 5/11/2017 9:14 PM, ChampS wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I want to use Cygwin to access all Windows applications installed on my Windows 7 system. The
> Problem is that Windows is using spaces in its environment variable 'Path' and Cygwin can not handle
> the spaces. Is there a way to use the Windows environment variable 'Path' even with spaces in it?
> For Example I want to start x86 sbt via Cygwin, then I will get the following error message:
> "/cygdrive/c/Program Files (x86)/sbt/bin/sbt: line 61: /sbt-launch-lib.bash: No such file or
> directory". But when I try it with the default Windows cmd it works.
>
> Thought about something like iterating over the 'Path' environment variable in bashrc and adapt the
> strings to fit for Cygwin. But I don't know how I can access the Windows environment variables and
> how I could provide the adapted environment variable to Cygwin.
>
> Someone an idea how I could solve this issue?

Yeah, spaces are hell in paths in the Posix/Linux kind of world.

What you need is to "protect" the spaces with \ or have them inside a quoted string.
Also, items in a path need to be separated by : and not ; ....

This mostly has to do with understanding how strings, quoting, etc., work in
the Unix world and for bash in particular.  Over time I have developed methods
that work with these things that have space in them. For example, to add something
to the end of PATH:

PATH="${PATH}:/my/new/thing"

Here the quotes are important!  And they need to be " quotes not ' quotes!
( ' quotes would not allow ${PATH} to be expanded, while " quotes do allow that.)
Etc.

Regards - Eliot Moss

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