Copying System32 DLL using MSYS breaks the 64bit being of the library

Question

Under Windows 7 64bit, the *32.dll from System32 are 64bit libraries (according to Dependency Walker - depends.exe x64). A strange issue I noticed is that doing - for example - cp /c/System32/ws2_32.dll /c/mingw64/some/lib/libws2_32.dll in the MSYS Shell is breaking/converting the DLL to 32bit file (still according to Dependency Walker)... While copying/renaming it through Windows Explorer keep it unchanged... Still weird. If anyone has an explanation...

Or did I miss something about cp command usage...

Note: I already tried options like --preserve=all or --symbolic-link.

Thanks.

Answer 1

cp is somehow (either directly or due to the parent process that you're running it from) running as a 32-bit process. File System redirection is kicking in and you're actually copying ws2_32.dll from the C:\Windows\SysWOW64 directory instead - where it already exists as a 32-bit DLL.

32-bit applications can access the native system directory by substituting %windir%\Sysnative for %windir%\System32. WOW64 recognizes Sysnative as a special alias used to indicate that the file system should not redirect the access.