Subject: Re: bug#4867: 23.1; dired cannot find gunzip with Z; Windows

From: Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 05 Nov 2009 22:38:33 +0200

> From: "Xah Lee" <[email-masked]>
> Date: Thu, 5 Nov 2009 12:25:14 -0800
> 
> Found a solution. Create a file name gunzip.bat, with this content:
> 
> @echo off
> gzip -d %1

It's better to change the last line to

  gzip -d %*

because then you will be able to give more than one argument to this
batch file.  E.g., if you want to pass additional switches or unpack
several files.

> I think this should still considered a bug though. Considering it as a 
> Windows OS problem isn't very helpful in solving this. I'm sure if similar 
> problems happen in linux that's OS issue, people probably will not look at 
> it as “Oh, it's OS issue, emacs doesn't need to deal with it”.

If you try the same with a Windows batch file on GNU/Linux, Emacs will
barf there as well.  Emacs behave according to the rules of the host
OS, so you cannot expect it to be able to run alien executables from
some other OS that the host does not recognize as executables and
doesn't know how to run.

Anyway, why do you have gunzip as a shell script?  I looked at a
native Windows port and on a GNU/Linux box, and they both have gunzip
as a first-class binary executable program.