Samuel Jacob's Weblog

Today I was trying to setup ACPI-CA source tree in my computer using the following command

git clone http://www.acpica.org/repos/acpica.git

but it gave me error when connecting to the site. I knew it was problem with my cygwin network settings. Since I have a proxy server in between, connections internet was failing.

Googleing internet for how to configure cygwin to use proxy didn’t yield any result. Two of my friends with Linux knowledge advised me to set an environment variable (http_proxy) to connect. After exporting it, everything worked fine.

export http_proxy=http://username:password@host:port/

I have been using Noetpad++ for more than 2 years. It is a wonderful editor – it is very light and feature rich. I use it for editing any text files (txt, ini, C, C++, html, css..). I was happy with Notepad++ for editing my C project source files. Only thing I didn’t like was, to compile I have to go to command prompt and then to correct errors I have to note down the line numbers and open notepad++ modify….

Yesterday, I started searching for a new notepad replacement cum IDE for my Ace(C on cygwin) project. Dev-Cpp and PSPad were IDEs I got. I downloaded and installed both of them. Here comes the problem, both are heavier than notepad++. I might have not explored well, both don’t have option to run cygwin make and capture output and process it.

So I decided to create a notepad++ plugin for my need. But before that wanted to try existing plug-ins and found NppExec. This plug-in allows to run command inside notepad++ and captures the output. It also opens a C file and goto line numbers if it was in the error output if you double click on a line containing “error:” or “warning:” string (I found this one accidently). Downloaded NppExec and ran “make” inside it; but got what I really expected. The output of cygwin “make” has relative path.

i386/io.c:19: error: `Port’ undeclared (first use in this function)
make[1]: *** [i386/io.o] Error 1
make: *** [kernel] Error 2

Since my project make works by invoking “make” inside each directory, relative path will be little complicated – so decided to use absolute path in the output of gcc warning and errors. So modified the explicit rule like following.

$(CC) -c $(abspath $I./include $(CFLAGS)

Out of topic – good make file http://make.paulandlesley.org/autodep.html

Now the output is like the following

/cygdrive/e/sam/Ace3/src/kernel/i386/io.c:19: error: `Port’ undeclared (first use in this function) make[1]: *** [i386/io.o] Error 1 make: *** [kernel] Error 2

This output was not enough because, if I double click this line, notepad tries to open c:/ /cygdrive/e/sam/Ace3/src/kernel/i386/io.c instead of e:/sam/Ace3/src/kernel/i386/io.c.

To solve this problem the I used the following script in notepad++ run command(hotkey – F6)

c:\cygwin\bin\bash -l -c ‘cd src;make 2> err; sed -e “s@\(\/cygdrive\/\)\([a-zA-Z]\)@\2:@g” err; rm err’

Sed help: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-sed2.html

Explanation of this command:

c:\cygwin\bin\bash -l –c

Tells NppExec to execute bash and capture its ouput. –l means login and execute bash scripts and profile – I need this for setup my make environment. –c means execute the commands given as argument and exit. Each command is separated by semi-colon.

cd src; – needs no explanation – not needed may be in your case.

make 2> err; – run make and redirect errors to “err” file.

sed -e “s@\(\/cygdrive\/\)\([a-zA-Z]\)@\2:@g” err; – find the pattern /cygdrive/? And replace it with /cygdrive/?:

rm err – remove the error file.

If double clicking on the error/warning message is not opening the file, then try configuring NppExec’s console output filter by using the following %ABSFILE%:%LINE%: warning:* and %ABSFILE%:%LINE%: error:*