I use emacs within Cygwin, and often I want to paste a pathname from an explorer window into emacs and use it there. Unfortunately you have to edit it by hand before it will work.

So for example a path like:

c:\code\haskell\cats\monkeys

Needs to be converted to:

/cygdrive/c/code/haskell/cats/monkeys

The following interactive elisp function does that with the currently selected text:



(defun win32-to-cygwin-path()
  "Converts a win32 path into a cygwin happy one"
  (interactive)
  (save-excursion
    (save-restriction
      (narrow-to-region (point) (mark))
      (goto-char (point-min))
      (insert "/cygdrive/")
      (goto-char (point-min))
      (while (search-forward ":" nil t)
        (replace-match "" nil t))
      (while (search-forward "\\" nil t)
        (replace-match "/" nil t)))))


Nothing much clever going on here, just two search and replaces for the slashes and to removed the colon, and I insert the cygdrive prefix.