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

[Tomas Kalibera]

On 10/30/23 19:07, Yihui Xie wrote:
> 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.

I can reproduce the problem, also separately from R. It is not an R problem

./fmtutil-sys.exe --version
works

./fmtuti~1 --version
doesn't work

The problem is in runscript.tlu, when it looks at "progname", it parses 
it assuming it is the full name, looking for "-sys" suffix, which won't 
be in the short name:

progname, substcount = string.gsub(progname, '%-sys$', '')
local sysprog = (substcount > 0) -- true if there was a -sys suffix removed

and it does further processing using the program name.

This has to be fixed on the luatex end, it must be able to work with 
short paths (e.g. expand it appropriately). You could probably work 
around the installation before it gets fixed, e.g. by creating another 
wrapper which would expand to long names, delete the short name, patch 
the script, etc. After all, if it works via a shell, then probably the 
shell is expanding to the long names and you have a work-around (I don't 
know how reliable).

Adding an option to R's system*() functions to use only long names 
doesn't make sense.

Best
Tomas

>
> 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
>     >
>     >       [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>     >
>     > ______________________________________________
>     > R-devel using r-project.org mailing list
>     > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>
	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]