Undesirable nul file with tlmgr.bat under Windows

[Ken Brown]

On 7/18/2019 9:34 PM, Norbert Preining wrote:
> Hi Torsten,
> 
> thanks for your debugging, this is all strange.
> 
>> DEBUG cmd = wget http://mirror.ctan.org --timeout=30 -O nul 2>&1
> 
>>      my $cmd = "$wget $mirror --timeout=$NetworkTimeout -O "
>> !              . (win32() ? "nul" : "/dev/null")
>> !              . " 2>&1 >" . (win32() ? "nul" : "/dev/null");
> 
> So you *DO* get win32() == true ... in contrast to what you send me.
> 
> It seems that
> - if the program is started via tlmgr.bat, perl detects is a Windows.
> - the redirection in the .bat file to nul works
> - the -O nul does NOT work because wget thinks different
> 
> So this is really messed up situation, and now I somehow agree with
> Reinhard that mixing .bat Windows files with cygwin seems not an optimal
> solution.
> 
> What puzzles me is that with the abov change one should *still* get the
> nul file from the -O, so maybe my theory is still not correct.
> 
>> DEBUG cmd = wget http://mirror.ctan.org --timeout=30 -O nul 2>&1 >nul
>> than it seems to work. At least for this test case. Here is the diff
> 
> Very very strange ...
> 
> Any cygwin knowledgable participants here?

I've been casually following this discussion, as the maintainer of TeX Live on 
Cygwin, and I too agree with Reinhard.  Using Cygwin tools to install Win32 TeX 
Live is asking for trouble.

Torsten, you said in your first message that you "always use Cygwin (closest 
approximation to Linux workflow)."  So why not just use the TeX Live that has 
been built for Cygwin?  You can do this either by using Cygwin's package manager 
or, if you prefer, by following the instructions at the top of 
https://www.tug.org/texlive/quickinstall.html.  If you do the latter, then 
updating with tlmgr works exactly as it would on GNU/Linux or any other 
Unix-like system.

Ken