Re: PATH & Perl 5.6 on Win32 ?

['Trent Mick']

On Tue, Apr 10, 2001 at 06:00:04PM -0700, Eric Brown wrote:
> The bug isn't that the copy of the path passed to the child is wrong, it's
> that the environment *at the time CreateProcess() is called* is wrong.


Here was Sarathy's answer to that:
> >But it works in Python. :) Oh well.
> 
> Probably because Python uses MSVCRT's spawnvp() to implement system().
> IIRC, MSVCRT will attempt to locate the file by navigating the PATH,
> and give up if it can't "find" it.  (The rules for what constitutes
> "finding" it are fuzzy, and subject to MSVCRT bugs.)
> 
> To avoid any MSVCRT issues, Perl calls CreateProcess() directly, and
> doesn't attempt to locate the file by itself--instead, it lets the OS
> find it using its "normal" rules.  MSVCRT's rules may be more "normal"
> in some situations, but what the OS does is distinctly better in others.
> 
> It's hard to implement both kinds of bugs simultaneously.  :-)


[Eric Brown]:
> Running everything in a subshell will work, at the cost of losing the exit
> code - cmd -c and cmd -k return the exit code of *cmd.exe*, not the
> executed process.

What I do it take the user's list of commands and wrap them in a tmp batch
file that looks like this:

   <user's commands>
   exit %ERRORLEVEL%

Then run "cmd /C <batfilename>". That should get the correct return value
back.

Maybe Cons could be setup to do this in the background. Or would that be
evil? I am not a Cons guru so I don't know if that would break other things.


Trent


-- 
Trent Mick
address@hidden