From: "Ball, Donald A Jr (Library)" <donald.ball@...>
Date: 2007-11-14T07:20:47+09:00
Subject: Re: How to debug failing Kernel.system call

> > I'm on a win32 box, fwiw, running ruby-1.8.5. Do I need to 
> be manually 
> > quoting the parameters to system? (Docs and previous experience 
> > suggest not, but I've been wrong before.)
> 
> Try to examine stderr output.  Plus try to enclose the 
> parameters with spaces in double quotes--it's Windows anyway, 
> so who knows, it might work that way. ;-)

I've switched to using the single argument version of system doing my
own quoting of parameters with spaces, and I continue to get a failing
error code. Here's what I'm doing now:

system("svn commit --non-interactive --message \"File added by dball\"")

after changing pwd to the root of the folder in which the svn repository
is checked out. Stderr reports:

svn: Commit failed (details follow):
svn: Unable to open an ra_local session to URL
svn: Unable to open repository
'file:///z:/techserv/svn/intranet-files/reports'

The true svn repository is at file:///z:/techserv/svn/intranet-files,
while the file I added is in the reports directory.

I'd submit that this has nothing to do with ruby but for the fact that
when I run that command string from the win32 command shell, it works as
expected. I'm pretty much at a loss now, so if anyone has any
suggestions, no matter how bizarre, I'm all ears.

- donald