Just Programmer's Manual

Paths on Windows

On Windows, all functions that return paths, except invocation_directory() will return \-separated paths. When not using PowerShell or cmd.exe these paths should be quoted to prevent the \s from being interpreted as character escapes:

ls:
    echo '{{absolute_path(".")}}'

cygpath.exe is an executable included in some distributions of Unix userlands for Windows, including Cygwin and Git for Windows.

just uses cygpath.exe in two places:

For backwards compatibility, invocation_directory(), uses cygpath.exe to convert the invocation directory into a unix-style /-separated path. Use invocation_directory_native() to get the native, Windows-style path. On unix, invocation_directory() and invocation_directory_native() both return the same unix-style path.

cygpath.exe is used also used to convert Unix-style shebang lines into Windows paths. As an alternative, the [script] attribute, currently unstable, can be used, which does not depend on cygpath.exe.

If cygpath.exe is available, you can use it to convert between path styles:

foo_unix := '/hello/world'
foo_windows := shell('cygpath --windows $1', foo_unix)

bar_windows := 'C:\hello\world'
bar_unix := shell('cygpath --unix $1', bar_windows)