From:	"Peter S Tillier" <petert AT deadspam DOT com>
Newsgroups:	comp.os.msdos.djgpp
Subject:	Re: gawk 3.1.1 DJGPP v2.04 on Windows 2000 Pro problem using system() function and LFNs
Date:	Wed, 29 Jan 2003 13:24:32 -0000
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"Charles Sandmann" <sandmann AT clio DOT rice DOT edu> wrote in message
news:3e37507d DOT sandmann AT clio DOT rice DOT edu...
> > I tried using your suggestion in various ways, but in each
> > case it seems that, although cmd.exe is called at some point
> > and displays its version, etc., it never exits, so that each
> > time it is called another shell instance is opened.  In the
> > end I have had to type "exit" several times to exit the DOS
> > window.  This is Windows 2000 Pro, SP2.
>
> Try
>   SET SHELL=%COMSPEC% /C
> which seems to work better.
>
> It did something useful in my test case, instead of just ignoring
> the command and spawning CMD

I did try this but as Eli says in his posting, I don't
think that SHELL= should take parameters such as /C.
In MSDOS config.sys files the only parameters that
SHELL usually takes are /e or /p but it does depend on
what the shell is.  The /e and /p are correct for
command.com in MSDOS.

A further experiment, prompted by a posting in
comp.lang.awk (where this all started out) by Andrew
Graham gives this odd looking result:

c:\>ver

Microsoft Windows 2000 [Version 5.00.2195]

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

c:\>gawk "BEGIN{print ENVIRON[\"COMSPEC\"]}"
C:\WINNT\SYSTEM32\COMMAND.COM

c:\>

i.e., despite ver and echo %COMSPEC% saying that
we're using cmd.exe, DJGPP gawk's ENVIRON array
thinks that we're using COMMAND.COM

Is it possible that there's a bug in DJGPP libc's
system() call?  I've d/l'd a copy of Andrew's latest
version as per his post: it has a date of 24/01/02
and the test shown above gives the same result.

It looks as if Eli's comment that there is a bug
somewhere is correct.  It could be in the way that
gawk obtains the information for its ENVIRON array,
but as I don't have the sources for the DJGPP v2.04
gawk-3.1.1 I am not able to check this.

BTW I know that SP3 for W2K has a revised COMMAND.COM
according to the M$ site, but I don't think that this
is causing the discrepancy between echo %COMSPEC% and
gawk's ENVIRON array that we are seeing here.

Thanks to Eli, Charles and Andrew for the help and
advice.

Regards,
Peter
--
Peter S Tillier
"Who needs perl when you can write dc and sokoban in sed?"

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