Subject: Re: bug#7784: executable-find does not find scripts on woe32

From: Jason Rumney <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 05 Jan 2011 15:14:48 +0800

On 05/01/2011 07:44, Sam Steingold wrote:
> GNU Emacs 23.2.1 (i386-mingw-nt5.2.3790)
>   of 2010-05-08 on G41R2F1
> --with-gcc (3.4) --no-opt --cflags -Ic:/xpm/include
>
> (executable-find "bzr")
> ==>  nil
> (executable-find "svn")
> ==>  "c:/gnu/cygwin/bin/svn.exe"
>
> the problem, apparently, stems from:
>
> (file-exists-p "c:/gnu/cygwin/bin/bzr")
> ==>  t
> (file-executable-p "c:/gnu/cygwin/bin/bzr")
> ==>  nil
> which is wrong because bzr is an executable python script.
>    

It may well be, but Windows does not know how to execute it.  You either 
need to run it by specifying the script as an argument to python.exe 
explicitly, or run it from within Cygwin bash, which interprets the #! 
comment syntax and presumably has some Cygwin specific way to simulate 
the executable bit in the filesystem.