guile's #'system call under cygwin/xemacs?

[Rick Taube]

I am running Guile 1.6.1 in several different environments: 
Linux/OSX/Cygwin. Its great. In each case I am working with guile as a 
subprocess of Xemacs 21.4.11. Sofar everything seems well-behaved in 
both Linux and OSX, however under Cygwin/Xemacs I cannot get Guile's 
'system' call to work. It does work if I run Guile from the Cygwin 
shell. I cannot figure out what pathname to pass to #'system to run 
'uname' or any other command from a subprocess of Xemacs. Ive tried 
various and sundry incantations of "/cygdrive/c/cygwin/bin/uname" and 
"/usr/bin/uname" and so on but it never finds it.

Question #1: Can someone tell how I get the 'system' procedure to work 
under Xeamcs/cygwin? (One possible source of confusion: in the Cygwin 
shell "which uname" reports /usr/bin/uname but the "uname.exe" file is 
actaually under "C:\cygwin\bin\uname.exe"  ditto with the guile.exe 
itself.)

Question #2: I need access to the 'uname' command to figure out what OS 
im running under -- is there a better way to do this??)

Question #3 (and I know im pushing my luck here but what the heck...) : 
My software system computes MIDI files which I would like to 
automatically play after they are generated on the PC.  There is is a 
window's Media player sitting in
        C:\Program Files\Windows Media Player\mplayer2.exe
that is very tempting -- How can I exec this program from inside 
Guile/Xemacs ?

thanks for any help

Rick Taube
Associate Professor, Composition/Theory
School of Music
University of Illinois
Urbana, IL 61821 USA
net: address@hidden
fax: 217 244 8319
vox: 217 244 2684