[GRASS-windows] native grass63RC4 and MSYS shell

[Moritz Lennert]

On 08/02/08 22:11, Glynn Clements wrote:
> Mirko Baruffini wrote:
> 
>> I' m using wingrass grass63RC4. The use is ok, but, when I launch 
>> grass63.bat, it does not load the shell msys (I have uncommented and 
>> adapted some of the environment variables in grass/bin/grass63.bat).
>>
>> So i decided to launch a script with native wingrass launching grass 
>> from within the msys shell.
>> When I type /c/grass/bin/grass63 it does not load grass. On the sceen I 
>> can read:
>>
>> mirko.baruffini at ISTPC29 /
>> $ /c/grass63RC4/bin/grass63
>> /c/grass63RC4/grass-6.3.0RC4/etc/Init.sh: uname: command not found
>> /c/grass63RC4/grass-6.3.0RC4/etc/Init.sh: uname: command not found
>> /c/grass63RC4/grass-6.3.0RC4/etc/Init.sh: mkdir: command not found
>> Cannot create temporary directory! Exiting.
>>
>> But the command uname exists:
>>
>> mirko.baruffini at ISTPC29 /
>> $ uname
>> MINGW32_NT-5.1
>>
>> What could  I do?
> 
> AFAIK, starting GRASS or running GRASS commands from the MSys shell is
> unsupported under Windows.

No, it should work. I cannot reproduce the above error messages. 
However, to make the current 63RC4 package work, you have to change the 
bin/grass63 file from

GISBASE=c:/grass63RC4/grass-6.3.0RC4

to

GISBASE=/c/grass63RC4/grass-6.3.0RC4

Then it works well for me (not everything tested, though).

> Unfortunately, MSys shell provides an environment which is somewhere
> between Unix and Windows, and not entirely compatible with either. In
> particular, any pathnames which GRASS sees will need to be compatible
> with Windows, e.g. C:\path\to\file or C:/path/to/file rather than
> MSys' /c/path/to/file convention.

Well, actually, as you can see above, for launching grass you need the 
msys style.

> The focus of WinGRASS is to produce a *native* Windows version. Unless
> you're building WinGRASS yourself, you shouldn't need MSys for
> anything other than running shell scripts.

And even then, I guess other shells would also do the trick, such as 
Gnuwin32's shell and tools such as awk and sed. Msys is more convenient 
as the default installation contains these tools.

Moritz