From: Shusaku <tsyk@...>
Date: 2001-07-06T02:08:51+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:17333] Re: ` (back tick) on Win32 machines


On Thu, 5 Jul 2001 23:24:34 +0900
Stephan K�mper <Stephan.Kaemper@Schleswig-Holstein.de> wrote:

> Hmmm. I'm still a bit (a byte to be true) puzzled. That's because it works
> as (I) expected with Perl, eg
> 
>         print `dir`
> 
> works fine in the Perl flavour I use on both Win2K and Win98. And I wished
> it'd be the same behaviour in Ruby. That would make migrating form Win98 to
> Win2K (or vice versa) a lot more easy (No need to detect the Win flavour and
> then chose cmd.exe or command.com respectively.)

What do you get from an environment variable 'COMSPEC'?
I get this on Win2K.

C:\WORK>echo %COMSPEC%
C:\WINNT\system32\cmd.exe

And I get 'COMSPEC=C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND.COM' on Win98.
I'm using "ruby 1.6.4 (2001-06-04) [i586-mswin32]", compiled with VC6.

ruby -e 'puts `dir`'    # works fine.
perl -e "print `dir`"   # works fine too. (ActiveState's Perl)

Then I saw different behavior with improper COMSPEC, when perl
works still fine.

C:\WORK>set COMSPEC=C:\Wombat.exe
C:\WORK>ruby -e 'puts `dir`'
-e:1:in ``': No such file or directory - "dir" (Errno::ENOENT)
        from -e:1

And surprised result ...   (but, Perl still worked!)

C:\WORK>set COMSPEC=         <-- remove the variable
C:\WORK>ruby -e 'puts `dir`'
-e:1: [BUG] Segmentation fault
ruby 1.6.4 (2001-06-04) [i586-mswin32]

abnormal program termination

-- 
Shusaku <tsyk@yk.rim.or.jp>