On Thu, 12 Sep 2002, Kai Großjohann wrote:

>  Klaus Berndl <Klaus.Berndl@raibau.raiffeisen.at> writes:
>  
> > But it should not matter because i would recommend to check the
> > environment-variable COMSPEC (which is set always be every windows
> > system!), maybe like follows:
>  
>  Ah, I didn't know about COMSPEC.  I now use the following code to
>  initialize the variable:
>  
>    (if (memq system-type '(windows-nt))
>        (getenv "COMSPEC")
>      "/bin/sh")
>  Are there other values of system-type that I should check for?

The info manual says for *system-type*:

,----
| ...
|     `ms-dos'
|           Microsoft MS-DOS "operating system."  Emacs compiled with
|           DJGPP for MS-DOS binds `system-type' to `ms-dos' even when
|           you run it on MS-Windows.
| ...
`----

but i think today MS-DOS is not relevant anymore.

But i'm not sure about *cygwin32* as system-type. For the cygwin port of
recent XEmacs system-type is set to this value, don't know what value is set
for the cygwin port of GNU Emacs 21.2 (which seems to available now).

COMSPEC is also set for the cygwin-suite (because it "ingerits" the env-vars
of Windows) and it has normally the value "cmd.exe".

Because i do not know for which purpose you need the command-interpreter of
windows i can not say what is better for cygwin-ports of (X)Emacs: the value
of COMSPEC or "/bin/sh" (which is of course available on cygwin-systems)?!

Summary: Dependent of the usage you maybe want to check also for *cygwin32*!

Ciao,
Klaus