Re: [NT] Problem with `man' function

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: David Abrahams <dave@boost-consulting.com>
> Date: Sun, 23 Oct 2005 08:02:56 -0400
> 
> With Cygwin installed and in my PATH, `M-x man' used to work fine for
> me.  In the past year, it has stopped working; all I get is "error in
> process sentinel. Can't find the xxx manpage."  I was able to work
> around the problem either by setting  shell-file-name to 
> 
>   "sh" 
> 
> or, guessing that it was a CMD.EXE line length issue, by shortening
> Man-filter-list to
> 
>   (("sed" "" "-e '/^[^A-^Z][^A-^Z]*$/d'" "-e '/^[[789]/s///g'" ))

I don't think this has anything to do with CMD command-line
limitations: the filter script is only about 700 characters, much less
than the CMD's 2KB command limitation.  Quoting arguments with '..',
however (see above) might very well be the reason for the failure when
CMD is the shell, because Windows programs in general don't understand
'..' quoting, and CMD, unlike Bash, doesn't remove the '' from
command-line arguments.

> I don't know what the best fix might be.

It would be best if you debugged the problem and told us precisely
what the problem was; your description sounds like you aren't really
sure.  It could as well be a Cygwin bug, or some change in Emacs that
exposes a Cygwin bug.

> Can anyone tell me the implications of setting shell-file-name to
> "sh?"

All your shell commands will be run via (presumably Cygwin port of)
Bash, so native CMD commands will have to be preceded by "cmd /c".