Re: [NT] Problem with `man' function

[Dave Abrahams]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz <at> gnu.org> writes:

> I tried to debug this, but I'm sorry to say that I cannot reproduce
> exactly the behavior you describe.  

Interesting.  Still happens for me with the latest CVS of emacs and recently
updated Cygwin.  And it's clearly the awk command that's causing it.  If I
delete the awk command, all is well.

> "M-x man" indeed fails for me in
> the Windows port, but the error message displayed by Emacs is
> different:
> 
>     sed: -e expression #1, char 1: unknown command: `''
>     awk: '
>     awk: ^ invalid char ''' in expression
> 
>     process exited abnormally with code 1
> 
> The messages from Sed and Awk say quite unequivocally that the problem
> is with the quoting style: Windows shells and programs don't support
> the '..' quoting that man.el uses.

Using the other quoting made no difference whatsoever for me.

> I tried to replace '..' quoting with ".." quoting, but then bumped
> into other bugs, this time in Sed.  It sounds like the GnuWin32 port
> of Sed is hopelessly broken.  Or it could be a bug with cmdproxy.exe,
> I really don't have time to dig into that.
> 
> Perhaps with the Cygwin ports you have man.el will work if you replace
> '..' quoting with ".." quoting in the Sed and Awk scripts used by
> man.el.  Could you perhaps try that?

Tried it, to no avail.

> Failing that, I suggest to use woman.el.

Aww, this is discouraging.  Can't you suggest a place to breakpoint so we can
look at what's coming out of awk?

--
David Abrahams
Boost Consulting
http://www.boost-consulting.com