OpenEuphoria

Re: system_exec fun :(

• Posted by jbrown1050 at hotpop.com Jan 30, 2003
• 427 views

On Sun, Apr 22, 2001 at 03:11:17AM +0200, Alan Oxley wrote:
> 
> Gents and Ladies,
> After many hours of puzzlement, code butchering and fighting with
> delimiters,

> I discovered that you cannot call a program directly via system_exec if the
> program name is not the msdos 8.3 format. While the difficulties with the
>  "C:\\progra~1\\" etc are mentioned in the mailing list, the program name
> restriction does not appear to be.
> example: system_exec("PatrolCli",2)  -- fails with -1, no other info
> while system_exec("PATROL~1",2) -- works ok.

Its not suprising, unless your calling system_exec() from exw.exe

(ex.exe being a dos program, can't see long filenames at all.)

> What took so long, was the fact that if you type the "PatrolCli" yourself,
> it works!
> 
> The workaround is to do a dos "dir /X" and trap the output - this shows both
> the
>  long and shortened name. Grab the short version and away you go.

try Juergen's lfn.e, it can give you long filename support (it has a function,
you can use it to file the short filename of a file, given its long
filename, iirc that is).

> 
> Also, system_exec is a function that returns -1 if the command failed.
>  You can't redirect output, so you are in the dark as to the failure.
> Anybody know a sane way of discovering the problem when you get -1 ?.

Its probably a "Command not found" type of thing ... odds are good that its
looking for a command named "patrolcl" but not finding it, in this case.

> Tried  system() but I get invalid command; I have a convoluted argument
> that is not acceptible to system(). Over 100 chars long in fact.
> I've fixed it now, but what about next time?

Could you be more specific about this?

> 
> Finally, you can't stack win2k (dos) commands with an ampersand -
>  you get "invalid continuation" from Euphoria.

Huh? Show us the line where you use the '&' w/ the commands.

> 
> IMHO some better feedback from system_exec would be very welcome!
> 
> HTH other strugglers with system_exec.

> 
> Cheers
> Alan
> 

jbrown

> 
> 
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