Hey,

I am trying to containerize an ancient, obscure CI/CD system and as part of this I want to set up cygwin inside a Windows Server 2025 Core container.
The problem I am facing is that the MontaVista compiler from 2006 uses several .lnk files (shortcuts) as a replacement for symbolic links. While cygwin on the existing CI/CD server (from 2010, I suppose) is able to resolve the .lnk files to their executables, for instance, gcc.exe.lnk can be called using just gcc, the new installation is not able to resolve the shortcuts anymore.

For instance, on the existing system the command /cygdrive/d/MontaVista/opt/montavista/pro/devkit/mips/fp_be/mips-hardhat-linux/bin/gcc resolves the shortcut .../fp_be/mips-hardhat-linux/bin/gcc correctly to .../fp_be/bin/mips_fp_be-gcc, as shown below:


$ /cygdrive/d/MontaVista/opt/montavista/pro/devkit/mips/fp_be/mips-hardhat-linux/bin/gcc --version

mips_fp_be-gcc (GCC) 3.3.1 (MontaVista 3.3.1-7.0.42.0600552 2006-04-30)
Copyright (C) 2003 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
Dies ist freie Software; die Kopierbedingungen stehen in den Quellen. Es
gibt KEINE Garantie; auch nicht f"ur VERKAUFBARKEIT oder F"UR SPEZIELLE ZWECKE.


However, the modern cygwin installation can not resolve the shortcut /cygdrive/d/MontaVista/opt/montavista/pro/devkit/mips/fp_be/mips-hardhat-linux/bin/gcc.exe.lnk as the older installation, as shown below:


$ /cygdrive/d/MontaVista/opt/montavista/pro/devkit/mips/fp_be/mips-hardhat-linux/bin/gcc.exe.lnk

/bin/sh: line 1: /cygdrive/d/MontaVista/opt/montavista/pro/devkit/mips/fp_be/mips-hardhat-linux/bin/gcc.exe.lnk: cannot execute binary file: Exec format error


Below is the content of the file /cygdrive/d/MontaVista/opt/montavista/pro/devkit/mips/fp_be/mips-hardhat-linux/bin/gcc.exe.lnk:


$ cat /cygdrive/d/MontaVista/opt/montavista/pro/devkit/mips/fp_be/mips-hardhat-linux/bin/gcc.exe.lnk
L?F
../../bin/mips_fp_be-gcc.exe..\..\bin\mips_fp_be-gcc.exe


How can I make sure that the shortcuts stored inside the .lnk files are restored as on the existing CI/CD server? Could it be a problem with the locale, as the current system is set to German and the shortcuts were created by an old MontaVista compiler installation? Is there a more suited program than cat for inspecting Windows shortcuts?

Thank you so much for your help!

see here: https://superuser.com/questions/7901...tcut-files-lnk

Thank you for the tip, I had tried earlier and I had received the following error:

$ cygstart /cygdrive/d/MontaVista/opt/montavista/pro/devkit/mips/fp_be/mips-hardhat-linux/bin/gcc.exe.lnk --version
Unable to start 'D:\MontaVista\opt\montavista\pro\devkit\mips\fp_be\mips-hardhat-linux\bin\gcc.exe.lnk': There is no application associated with the given file name extension.

I just tried again and I received the same error.

sorry, I have no cygwin, no lnk files, but I guess you can use cygstart to run cmd and start lnk inside. (or at least something similar should work).

Is a virtual machine an option?

or WSL....

Is it a 32-bit compiler by any chance? And you new installation is, of course, 64-bit because cygwin dropped 32-bit support quite some time ago.

Okay, I was able to solve the problem. It turned out that cygwin shortcut resolution has changed over time and the shortcuts created by MontaVista in 2006 can not be resolved using the current cygwin version 3.6.4-1. However, I was able to use the cygwin time machine to download cygwin version 2.10.0-1. Using this version, the shortcut resolution worked on my corporate M$ machine.

However, when working with Windows containers there were several issues with the file attributes missing due to the file system being used by docker. I initially tried to unzip the ZIP archive into the container file system during the build phase so that the container would start as fast as possible and be self-contained. However, the shortcut resolution did not work due to issues with the file attributes. Thus, as a fix given that the container is an intermediate solution while modernising the build process, I decided to mount the unzipped directory containing the compiler using docker's -v option: docker run --rm --name mips-build -v C:\xyz\resources\MontaVista:C:\MontaVista mips-build:0.0.0.

However, the compiler needs to be located inside the "D: drive". Thus, I created a symbolic link as part of the CMD instruction within the Docker file:

CMD [ "C:\\cygwin64\\bin\\bash.exe", "--login", "-i", "-c", "ln -s /cygdrive/c/montavista/ /cygdrive/d/MontaVista", "&&", "..." ]

These measures fixed the issues with the build. I am leaving this up in case anyone struggles with issues like that later.

Thanks everybody for the help!