Octave under Emacs: "Spawning child process: exec format error"

[Carlos Puig]

Francois,

I had the same error message when trying to run octave from within
emacs.

In my original octave installation (from an octave binary distribution),
octave was executed via a symbolic link.   Although Cygwin supports
symbolic links, apparently NTemacs 20.7 does not -- it seems to be
trying to execute the symbolic link directly and complains about an
improperly formatted exec file.

In my case the solution was to get rid of the symbolic link file by
renaming/copying octave's executable, so that emacs gets the full-sized
octave executable on the first try -- mine is simply named "octave.exe."
>From a cygwin shell window, do an "ls -al" to see if octave is being
executed via a symbolic link.

Hope this helps.

Carlos

> I have Octave running (version 2.1.30 for Win32) on its own and want
to run
> it from within Emacs.  I originally had Octave installed in "c:ŠÜOctave
> 2.1.30" with the executables octave.exe and octave-2.1.30.exe being
located
> in the directory "c:ŠÜOctave 2.1.30ŠÜusrŠÜlocalŠÜbinŠÜ".  In my "_emacs
file I
> had"
>
> (setq-default inferior-octave-program "c:/Octave
> 2.1.30/usr/local/bin/octave-2.1.30.exe")
> (autoload 'octave-mode "octave-mod" nil t)
> (setq auto-mode-alist
> (cons '("ŠÜŠÜ.m$" . octave-mode) auto-mode-alist))
>
> but I got the response "Spawning child process: exec format error"
>
> I was advised to change Octave to another directory or change the name
of
> the folder to one without spaces.  I consequently put Octave in a
folder in





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