problems with exec("rundll32.exe shell32.dll...")

Tue May 20 13:52:00 GMT 2003

> thanks but this hasn't worked either - in fact passing any file as the
> arg[0] makes no difference(!), I don't think its even getting that far
> (altered the code to as below)
>> I don't understand exactly how this could be going wrong, unless maybe "_"
> is somehow munged by Runtime.exec?

The problem that you are reporting as well as that
reported by Oywind can be traced to the fact that
we put a double quote (") around every argument
on a command line before calling Win32 CreateProcess( )
like so:
 "foo" "bar" "snafu"
Both of you can easily reproduce the behaviour that you
are seeing by trying the following on the command line:
 cmd /c echo Hello!
 v/s
 "cmd" "/c" "echo" "Hello!"
(ditto for Andrew's rundll32 case).
However, we had a good reason for doing this:
http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/java-patches/2003-q1/msg00502.html
(Also see the messages following it).
I do not know why this behaviour changes for these
programs - a simple test program in C that I wrote
that merely prints out argv[] never manages to
see the difference between quoted and unquoted
command lines. :-(
Ranjit.
-- 
Ranjit Mathew Email: rmathew AT hotmail DOT com
Bangalore, INDIA. Web: http://ranjitmathew.tripod.com/