From: Wyss Clemens <WYS@...>
Date: 2001-07-06T14:20:13+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:17379] Re: ` (back tick) on Win32 machines

My logical deduction would be:
  "perl does NOT make use of the COMSPEC setting, but has kind of an own
shell built-in".
;-)
Starting from [ruby-talk:17059] I had problems with the system- (and
IO.popen-) command. These commands are treated equally in the background as
the back ticked command (-> popen).
It ended up in [ruby-talk:17236] where I finally found the real
solution/"source of problem"! 
I had to copy over the cygwin sh.exe into the Ruby bin directory and all
commands worked as expected. Now this was with the cygwin Ruby build, but I
expect, that the sh.exe also "heals" the mswin Ruby build (see below).

Anybody volunteers to give the "sh.exe" a try? If cygwin is not (yet)
installed on your win98/95 box I could send you the binary (and the
cygwin.dll's). As the win32-build has it's own popen-command which
definitely makes use of the COMSPEC (see win32/win32.c) environment
variable, you would have to "set COMSPEC=c:\cygwin\sh.exe"

Regards
Clemens

> -----Urspr�ngliche Nachricht-----
> Von: Shusaku [mailto:tsyk@yk.rim.or.jp]
> Gesendet am: Donnerstag, 5. Juli 2001 19:09
> An: ruby-talk@ruby-lang.org
> Betreff: [ruby-talk:17333] Re: ` (back tick) on Win32 machines
> 
> 
<<SNIP>>
> 
> 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>
>