MSYS2 Notes

Page for things that pop up while fiddling with MSys2.

1. PS1 script: I had to replace PS1="$PS1"'\n' with PS1="$PS1"$'\n' within the profile file to get the git prompt working. See also this msys2 ticket page

2. When trying to debug environment issues, it can be very helpful to print out the environment as it comes into Git. Unfortunately, mingw_startup() – which converts the environment to UTF-8 – is run so early that the sprintf() family of functions does not work: the locale has not been initialized yet (because this would require the environment, using the LC_ALL environment variable!). Therefore, something like this is required:

#include <strsafe.h>
...
{
  char buffer[1024];
  StringCbPrintf(buffer, sizeof(buffer), "env %d is '%s'\n", i, environ[i]);
  write(2, buffer, strlen(buffer));
}