If you use ActiveState Perl 5.6.1 for Windows, build 631 or higher, there is now a working PERL5SHELL? feature - if you set this variable (upper case) in the Win2000 environment to 'bash -c' (without quotes), you should be able to use Cygwin-format filenames in the TWiki.cfg entries for ls, egrep and fgrep (not tested... you may need to restart the system or just Apache, and to add PERL5SHELL? to the Apache environment setup).

Here's a command line example to check this feature works in your Perl (it was broken in build 628):

C:\>set PERL5SHELL=bash -c

C:\>perl -e "system( qq( type echo  ) )"
echo is a shell builtin

C:\>set PERL5SHELL=cmd.exe /x/c

C:\>perl -e "system( qq( type echo  ) )"
The system cannot find the file specified.

-- RichardDonkin - 24 Feb 2002

If you set PERL5SHELL? to bash, you will also want to make sure that the $cmdQuote var in your TWiki.cfg is set appropriately for bash (that is, set to ' and not to "). There is a line in the default TWiki.cfg which automatically sets this to " on Windows platforms, and this is inappropriate if using bash.

Having $cmdQuote set incorrectly when using bash can cause some subtle quoting bugs when the TWiki perl scripts evaluate backtick expressions. One visible side effect of this is strange looking topics appearing at the end of WebIndex with names like "ls *.txt | grep ..."

-- FritzMueller - 04 Sep 2002