[Rd] system()/system2() using short paths of commands on Windows?

[Yihui Xie]

Sure. I'm not sure if it's possible to make it easier to reproduce, but for
now the example would require installing TinyTeX (via
tinytex::install_tinytex(), which can be later uninstalled cleanly via
tinytex::uninstall_tinytex() after you finish the investigation). Then run:

  system2('fmtutil-sys', '--all')
  # or tinytex:::fmtutil() if fmtutil-sys.exe is not on PATH

and TeX Live would throw an error like this:

  ...\username\AppData\Roaming\TinyTeX\bin\windows\runscript.tlu:864: no
appropriate script or program found: fmtuti~1

The command "fmtutil-sys" is longer than 8 characters and hence shortened
to "fmtutil~1". Yes, in principle, TeX Live should work with short path
names, but it doesn't at the moment. I haven't figured out if it was a
recent breakage in TeX Live or not (I've tried to contact TeX Live
developers).

BTW, shell('fmtutil-sys --all') works fine.

Regards,
Yihui
--
https://yihui.org


On Mon, Oct 30, 2023 at 12:34 PM Tomas Kalibera <tomas.kalibera using gmail.com>
wrote:

>
> On 10/30/23 17:18, Yihui Xie wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > It may have been so for 20+ years but I just discovered today that
> system()
> > would always try to use the short path of a command on Windows:
> > https://github.com/wch/r-source/blob/635a67/src/gnuwin32/run.c#L141 If
> > that's true, I wonder if it could provide an option to disable this
> > behavior, because we recently ran into a case in which short paths
> wouldn't
> > work. I wonder what the original motivation of using short paths was. If
> it
> > was to avoid spaces in paths, wouldn't shQuote() work? Thanks!
>
> Could you please file a minimal reproducible example that exhibits the
> problem caused by an attempt to translate to short path names (note
> there is a fallback to long path names)? In principle, short path names
> should work when they are returned by Windows, this should not be
> causing any trouble.
>
> Thanks
> Tomas
>
> >
> > Regards,
> > Yihui
> >
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> >
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>

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