edit() fails on Windows if the editor path contains slashes

[wdobbie]

julia> ENV["JULIA_EDITOR"] = "c:/windows/system32/notepad.exe"
"c:/windows/system32/notepad.exe"

julia> edit(println)
ERROR: could not spawn `c:windowssystem32notepad.exe 'C:\Users\Will\AppData\Local\Julia-0.4.0-dev\bin\../share\julia\base\string.jl'`: no such file or directory (ENOENT)
 in _jl_spawn at process.jl:216 (repeats 2 times)

The problem seems to be that edit() calls shell_parse() in string.jl which splits the string at backslash characters. Using forward slashes as above doesn't work because realpath() is called on it first, which converts them to backslashes. Example:

julia> s = "c:/windows/system32/notepad.exe"
"c:/windows/system32/notepad.exe"

julia> realpath(s)
"c:\\windows\\system32\\notepad.exe"

julia> Base.shell_split(ans)
1-element Array{AbstractString,1}:
 "c:windowssystem32notepad.exe"

[tkelman]

what's your versioninfo()? cc @dhoegh has made some changes to this code recently

[dhoegh]

@wdobbie does it work if your path is escaped like: "c:\windows\system32\notepad.exe" ? My changes should not affect this behavior and I have not used this, but I could probably fix it, but I do not have time in the next week.
@wdobbie if you would contribute with a fix it would be nice. The 'shell_parse' should not effect a path when it uses front slashes.

[vtjnash]

shell_parse is fine. the issue is that here

julia/base/interactiveutil.jl

Line 43 in 8d57d4c

run(`$(shell_split(edpath)) $file`)

we aren't calling it on the original environment variable input as we probably should be doing (it looks like this may be an issue for subl / atom also)

[ivarne]

@dhoegh I updated your escaped path to have quadruple forward slashes, because markdown uses \ to escape characters and with double \ you need to type four slashes in the source.

[wdobbie]

@tkelman my versioninfo() is

Julia Version 0.4.0-dev+2070
Commit f2b5a11 (2014-12-11 10:19 UTC)
Platform Info:
  System: Windows (x86_64-w64-mingw32)
  CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-5820K CPU @ 3.30GHz
  WORD_SIZE: 64
  BLAS: libopenblas (USE64BITINT DYNAMIC_ARCH NO_AFFINITY Haswell)
  LAPACK: libopenblas
  LIBM: libopenlibm
  LLVM: libLLVM-3.3

@dhoegh It fails with both forward and back slashes. I would suggest a fix but I couldn't understand the intent behind shell_parse splitting on backslash characters. It seems the function is intended to split a command line string into tokens while taking into account quoted strings, but I don't understand why it treats backslash as a token separator. Example:

julia> Base.shell_parse("/path/to/file arg1 arg2")
(:((("/path/to/file",),("arg1",),("arg2",))),0:-1)

julia> Base.shell_parse("\\path\\to\\file arg1 arg2")
(:((("path","to","file"),("arg1",),("arg2",))),0:-1)

I'm new to Julia and haven't figured out how to modify files in Base and have Julia see the changes, but it seems this could be fixed by removing the following part of shell_parse (this would break whatever depends on backslash separating tokens):

            elseif !in_single_quotes
                if done(s,k)
                    error("dangling backslash")
                end
                update_arg(s[i:j-1]); i = k
                c, k = next(s,k)
            end

Is there a way I can force Julia to reload the cached Base files?

[tkelman]

@wdobbie I'm guessing you're working from a nightly binary download, not a source build? The way to update files in base and have Julia see them is by deleting or renaming the file lib/julia/sys.ji, then running bin/prepare-julia-env.bat. This is subject to be replaced pretty soon with a Julia script that will work the same way on all platforms, but for now the bat file is the way to do it on Windows.

[nolta]

Should be fixed by #13032, but please reopen if it isn't.