Actually this only applies to small handfull of the cygwin tools. And diff isnt one of them :-) It works just peachy under cmd.exe and doesnt choke on real win32 paths.

However ive encountered this annoyance before myself. Iirc gzip and tar suffer from this problem. But most of them dont. (Although be careful with tail, it can cause Win2k to spontaneously reboot (no BSOD or anything!) if another process uses win32 directory change events on the same file as is being tailed.)
---
demerphq

_{<Elian> And I do take a kind of perverse pleasure in having an OO assembly language...}