Why all this "find executable in PATH" goosery on non-Win32?

[bengotow]

Hey! I'm trying to debug an issue I'm having with electron-spellcheck. Essentially on both my Debian and Fedora test machines, this line is failing (https://github.com/electron-userland/electron-spellchecker/blob/master/src/spell-check-handler.js#L590). To make things worse, the following catch yields an Observable.of(null), which then causes the next line to throw an exception because it expects strings. (Cannot call split on "null")

Aaanyway - that brought me here to spawn-rx, which looks great. I'm trying to understand why await spawn('locale', ['-a']) would fail in the first place, since on both these machines it works on the Terminal.

It seems like spawn-rx is calling runDownPath on non-Win32 platforms (https://github.com/paulcbetts/spawn-rx/blob/master/src/index.ts#L96), which seems to go through a lot of trouble trying to find an executable on the PATH (stating around, etc.) and introduces a handful of places that might be the source of my headache. This seems like overkill, since the system would do this automatically if you just tried to run the command.

Haven't found the root cause yet, so this is mostly an observation—I think that call to runDownPath could probably be removed and only used on Windows? Will file appropriate issues when I figure out what's going.

[bengotow]

Hah—just noticed the comment referring to this as goosery. Updating this issue accordingly. 🦆

[jacksteamdev]

This issue still exists for POSIX users, it's affecting my use of @modelcontextprotocol/inspector. findActualExecutable returns the wrong value if the user's Node version management uses shims. I'm getting this error:

Volta error: 'volta-shim' should not be called directly. Please use the existing shims provided by Volta (node, yarn, etc.) to run tools.

Stdio transport: command=/Users/jacksteam/.volta/bin/volta-shim, args=src/index.ts, env={"HOME":"/Users/jacksteam","LOGNAME":"jacksteam","PATH":"/Users/jacksteam/.npm/_npx/5a9d879542beca3a/node_modules/.bin:/Users/jacksteam/Documents/Cline/MCP/zettelkasten-server/node_modules/.bin:/Users/jacksteam/Documents/Cline/MCP/node_modules/.bin:/Users/jacksteam/Documents/Cline/node_modules/.bin:/Users/jacksteam/Documents/node_modules/.bin:/Users/jacksteam/node_modules/.bin:/Users/node_modules/.bin:/node_modules/.bin:/Users/jacksteam/.volta/tools/image/node/20.16.0/lib/node_modules/npm/node_modules/@npmcli/run-script/lib/node-gyp-bin:/Users/jacksteam/.volta/tools/image/node/20.16.0/bin:/Users/jacksteam/perl5/bin:/Users/jacksteam/Library/pnpm:/Users/jacksteam/.volta/bin:/opt/homebrew/opt/openjdk/bin:/Users/jacksteam/.jenv/shims:/Users/jacksteam/.jenv/bin:/opt/homebrew/bin:/opt/homebrew/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/System/Cryptexes/App/usr/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/var/run/com.apple.security.cryptexd/codex.system/bootstrap/usr/local/bin:/var/run/com.apple.security.cryptexd/codex.system/bootstrap/usr/bin:/var/run/com.apple.security.cryptexd/codex.system/bootstrap/usr/appleinternal/bin:/Library/Apple/usr/bin:/Users/jacksteam/Library/Application Support/Code/User/globalStorage/github.copilot-chat/debugCommand","SHELL":"/bin/zsh","TERM":"xterm-256color","USER":"jacksteam"}