Burger for Python supports the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), Cygwin and MSYS2 when attempting to execute or locate tools in the underlying Windows host. One of the main issues is the varied ways a Linux pathname is mapped to Windows.

When burger.strutils is loaded, it will perform tests to determine which python platform it's running under and will enable specialized code or run tools to properly handle pathname conversion. For WSL, the tool used is wslpath and for Cygwin and MSYS2 the tool is cygpath.

Pathname examples

If the path for windows looks like this, C:\Windows\Notepad.exe, it will look like this on these platforms.

WSL /mnt/c/Windows/Notepad.exe
Cygwin /cygdrive/c/Windows/Notepad.exe
MSYS2 /c/Windows/Notepad.exe

Pathname translation

If the burger library is running under WSL, Cygwin or MSYS2, the function wslwinreg.convert_to_windows_path() will convert a Linux style path into a Windows path and wslwinreg.convert_from_windows_path() will convert from a Windows path to a Linux style path. If burger is not running under these environments, these pathname translators will return the input without modification.

Environment flags

The flag is set to True if burger is running on the named platform, otherwise it will be False.

burger.strutils.IS_WINDOWS_HOST is True if the platform can execute Windows executables natively (Without Wine).

PATHEXT

PATHEXT is an environment variable present on Windows systems that presents a list of acceptable suffixes for executables. burger.buildutils.get_path_ext() will obtain the list of extensions available taking into account the differences of MSYS2, Cygwin, WSL and Windows. This function will return an empty list for macOS and Linux. WSL is a special case, since both native Linux and Windows .exe files can be executed, so the list will only have the suffixes for Windows executables.