Re: Ediff error -- Permission denied (Win8)

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Date: Mon, 9 Mar 2015 03:39:36 -0700 (MST)
> From: dbbd <danybraun@free.fr>
> 
> thanks for this post.  In fact, I have the same permission denied problem
> (emacs 24.3 under windows7, cygwin installed and added to windows path, diff
> working in DOS-terminal; problem still present if I log in as
> Administrator).  So I followed your advice, and here is the backtrack:
> 
> Debugger entered--Lisp error: (file-error "Searching for program"
> "permission denied" "diff")
>   call-process("diff" nil #<buffer *ediff-diff<2>*> nil "c:\\Program Files (x86)\\GNU\\emacs-24.3\\README" "c:\\Program Files (x86)\\GNU\\emacs-24.3\\README.W32")

Does this happen with any 2 files anywhere on your system, or just
files in that directory?

Also, please start by searching all your directories on PATH and on
exec-path for a file or directory called 'diff', with or without any
extensions, and see if you find one.

> Any idea why the permission could be denied coming from emacs, but diff runs
> fine when started directly in the DOS terminal?

Is this a Cygwin Diff or a native Windows Diff program?  If Cygwin, do
you really invoke it from cmd.exe, or do you invoke it from the Cygwin
Bash shell?