commandv on Windows: doesn't search without `.exe` (docs say it should)

[andrei-markeev]

Contact Details

No response

What happened?

It seems that the the logic for .exe / .com automatic suffixing was removed in c88f95a, however, it was never updated in the docs.

We automatically suffix .com and .exe for all platforms when path searching.

(https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/blob/master/tool/net/help.txt#L2880)

This is honestly very confusing. I was convinced commandv doesn't work on Windows at all and doing some work arounds until I accidentally spotted that it actually works if you provide the extension.

I thought to create an MR with help update, but then I noticed this comment in a6baba1:

The WIN32 CreateProcess() function does not require an .exe or .com
suffix in order to spawn an executable.

So I am a bit confused, maybe it's a bug and the suffixing should be reintroduced after all?

Version

redbean 3.0.0

What operating system are you seeing the problem on?

Windows

Relevant log output

>: unix.commandv('wsl')
nil     "commandv() failed: No such file or directory"
>: unix.commandv('calc')
nil     "commandv() failed: No such file or directory"
>: unix.commandv('wsl.exe')
"/C/WINDOWS/system32/wsl.exe"
>: unix.commandv('calc.exe')
"/C/WINDOWS/system32/calc.exe"

[jart]

We used to do the auto-suffixing, but the performance / complexity tradeoff ended up not being acceptable. Usually on Windows we're running programs from cosmos, which don't have the .exe or .com suffixes anymore. You should be able to write a wrapper easily that emulates the old behavior.