Using mingw/msys just for its posix tools: mount point question

Question

I write cross-platform software, so I like my Windows environment to be Un*x-like (I'm an old Unix/IRIX/Linux geek). I just care about shells and tools, not so much about compilers or the build environment (I have a real industrial-strength build system that doesn't depend on mingw or cygwin). I just want a shell window on my Windows box that works like a POSIX system.

I'd like to move away from cygwin and its CRLF weirdness and dll-dependencies and update troubles, and maybe replace it with mingw/msys. I've started to do this, but am stumped on one thing. I really really need mingw paths to map to the same Windows paths. So / must be c:/ and /windows -> c:/windows and so on. Mingw's default mount setup ends up like a chroot, with mingw "/" mapping to c:/mingw or something like that. You have to use drive prefixes like /c/windows to get to /Windows. I'm happy to tweak my $PATH and whatever else I need to do to make this work. Does anyone have any hints?

Answer 1

You can install Cygwin into C:/, in which case / does become C:/. Dunno whether that can be done with MSYS.

Btw, MSYS is a fork of Cygwin 1.3.3 from 9 years ago, which hasn't seen an awful lot of development compared to Cygwin proper. It has the same approach to line ending issues, allowing both binmode and textmode mounts.