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

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

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 mangle my paths and pathnames. For example, to build my program, I invoke

arm-none-linux-gnueabi-gcc.exe -Wall -g \
    -Wl,--dynamic-linker=/usr/lib/myrpath/ld-linux.so.3 \
    -Wl,-rpath=/usr/lib/myrpath \
    -I../targetsysroot/usr/include \
    myprogram.c -o myprogram

Of course, I want /usr/lib/myrpath inserted verbatim into the myprogram executable - the ARM Linux target I'm compiling for doesn't use MinGW or MSYS. But here's what ends up going into it:

...
0x0000000f (RPATH)            Library rpath: [C:/MinGW/msys/1.0/lib/myrpath]
...

Not exactly what I wanted. If I invoke GCC on the cmd.exe command line directly, I get the right rpath in the executable. If I invoke GCC on the MSYS command line, I get the mangled rpath. If I invoke GCC with a Makefile that is run with make from the cmd.exe command line, I still get a mangled rpath (!)

Any ideas how I might turn off this annoying behavior?

Solution

I just discovered a neat trick to avoid MSYS/MinGW translating the paths for you.

If you use double-slash to start the path, then MSYS won't translate the path to DOS format. So in OP's example, the -rpath switch should be specified like this:

-Wl,-rpath=//usr/lib/myrpath

All Unix/Linux tools seem to handle such spurious slashes without any problem, so even though your binary's rpath will start with //usr/... I think the loader will do the right thing.