From: Luis Lavena <luislavena@...>
Date: 2010-11-28T06:55:34+09:00
Subject: Re: Kernel.exec not behaving consistently on Windows?

On Nov 27, 6:07 pm, Jarmo Pertman <jarm...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello!
>
> It seems that Kernel.exec doesn't work consistently on Windows when
> compared with Kernel.system or IO.popen. Consider the following
> examples:
>
> This works:
> exec "ping", "localhost"
>
> This doesn't work:
> exec "ping.exe", "localhost"
> Errno::ENOENT: No such file or directory - ping.exe
>
> This works:
> exec "c:\\windows\\system32\\ping.exe", "localhost"
>
> This doesn't work:
> exec "c:\\windows\\system32\\ping", "localhost"
> Errno::ENOENT: No such file or directory - c:\windows\system32\ping
>
> By the way, all examples above seem to be working fine on 1.9 MRI, but
> fail on 1.8 MRI.
>

Ruby 1.8.x Kernel#exec is broken. The changes required to fix this
were so radical that couldn't be backported from 1.9.x to 1.8.x

Rake for example workaround this:

https://github.com/jimweirich/rake/blob/master/lib/rake/alt_system.rb

--
Luis Lavena