MinGW, Cygwin: Building GNU Bash 4

Using MinGW and Cygwin in Windows ME, I kept getting the same errors:

[main] sh fork: child -1 died waiting for longjmp before initialization

sh fork: resource temporarily unavailable

I have no clue what causes this problem. I just hope that building GNU bash myself would solve this problem. So I downloaded the source for GNU Bash 4.0. Before beginning bash compilation, I made sure zlib, libiconv and gettext were all installed. To see how I compiled these 3 libraries, read the beginning of this post.

Then, I configured bash:

./configure --prefix=/ --enable-alias --enable-arith-for-command --enable-array-variables --enable-brace-expansion --enable-casemod-attributes --enable-casemod-expansions --enable-command-timing --enable-help-builtin --enable-history --enable-job-control --enable-multibyte --enable-prompt-string-decoding --enable-readline --disable-nls

make

make install

MinGW: Porting GNU Regex to Windows

I am not sure if this regex thing is really necessary. Because it was mentioned in README.xmingw, I'll compile it just in case. I downloaded regex-0.12.tar.gz from http://ftp.gnu.org/old-gnu/regex/ and compiled it as follows:

cd $HOME
tar xzvf regex-0.12.tar.gz
cd regex-0.12/
gcc -DSTDC_HEADERS -DHAVE_STRING_H=1 -I. -c regex.c
ar ru libregex.a regex.o
cp libregex.a /mingw/lib
cp regex.h /mingw/include/

Using the PCRE library instead

The Perl Compatible Regular Expressions (PCRE) library can be used as replacement for the POSIX regex functions. Download the latest pcre library from here and compile it as follows:

./configure --prefix=/mingw --enable-pcre16 --enable-unicode-properties
make
make install

Rename some files so that programs requiring regex can be linked with pcre library.

cd /mingw/include
cp pcreposix.h regex.h

And,

cd /mingw/lib
cp libpcreposix.a libregex.a
cp libpcreposix.dll.a libregex.dll.a