This actually came up previously in bpo-1543469 in the context of test_subprocess, but it's a more general issue that I thought was worth addressing somehow.

The issue here is that as Cygwin tries to provide a "UNIX-like" experience, any system interfaces that take the path to an executable as an argument allow the .exe extension to be left off. This is particularly convenient for the shell experience, so that one can run, for example "python" or "ls" without typing "python.exe" or "ls.exe" (this is of course true of the Windows cmd shell as well).

In the case of ambiguity however--such as when there is both a "python" and a "python.exe" in the same path, one must explicitly add the ".exe", otherwise the path without the exe is assumed. This is made even worse when you factor in case-insensitivity.

Thus, this becomes a real annoyance when developing Python on Cygwin because you get both a "python.exe" and the "Python" directory in your source tree. This isn't so much of a problem, except that sys.executable leaves off the ".exe" (in UNIX-y fashion), so any test that calls Popen([sys.executable]) errors out because it thinks you're trying to execute a directory (Python/).

I think the only reasonable fix is to take the patch suggested at bpo-1543469, and ensure that the ".exe" suffix is appended to sys.executable on Cygwin. I think that sys.executable should be as unambiguous as possible, and that's the only way to make it reasonably unambiguous on Cygwin.

I've attached a patch adapted from the one in bpo-1543469 which solves the issue for me.

This patch has impact to end user, thus I don't agree to apply as far as Cygwin to avoid user surprise.
I think to need a consistency between other platforms having executable suffix (e.g. MSYS2), and also the patch needs short documentation of changing behavior to description for sys.executable.

I agree this has a slight change in behavior which I was at first hesitant about. But I think the previous behavior was wrong insofar as it was overly ambiguous. I agree it should apply on MSYS2 as well (I actually thought __CYGWIN__ was defined on MSYS2 but I could be wrong about that).

I'm not sure what better solution there is. I thought of tinkering with subprocess specifically, but that was too fragile.

I agree to add the suffix to solve ambiguous path on Cygwin. And I think the patch should apply to all platforms having executable suffix.

Therefore, I modified your patch to remove #if directive for Cygwin, and I changed title to spread covered platforms.
This patch uses EXE_SUFFIX that is the EXE defined on Makefile. If platform doesn't have executable suffix, doesn't add anything process.

I have missed a case of empty progpath. I updated the patch to avoid calling add_exe_suffix() at that case.

Thanks! Setting EXE_SUFFIX from the Makefile is much better.

I updated a patch to check the made path because previous patch has added suffix even to symbolic link. New patch works that If made path is invalid, revert to original.

New changeset 7a7693e by INADA Naoki (E. M. Bray) in branch 'master':
bpo-28441: Ensure .exe suffix in sys.executable on MinGW and Cygwin (GH-4348)
7a7693e

New changeset e5897b6 by Inada Naoki (Miss Islington (bot)) in branch '3.7':
bpo-28441: Ensure .exe suffix in sys.executable on MinGW and Cygwin (GH-4348)
e5897b6