Question

I am using mr on Windows and it allows running arbitrary commands before/after any repository action. As far as I can see this is done simply by invoking perl’s system function. However something seems very wrong with my setup: when making mr run the following batch file, located in d:

@echo off
copy /Y foo.bat bar.bat

I get errors on the most basic windows commands:

d:/foo.bat: line 1: @echo: command not found
d:/foo.bat: line 2: copy: command not found

To make sure mr isn’t the problem, I ran perl -e 'system( "d:/foo.bat" )' but the output is the same.

Using xcopy instead of copy, it seems the xcopy command is found since the output is now

d:/foo.bat: line 1: @echo: command not found
Invalid number of parameters

However I have no idea what could be wrong with the parameters. I figured maybe the problem is the batch file hasn’t full access to the standard command environment so I tried running it explicitly via perl -e 'system( "cmd /c d:\foo.bat" )' but that just starts cmd and does not run the command (I have to exit the command line to get back to the one where I was).

What is wrong here? A detailed explanation would be great. Also, how do I solve this? I prefer a solution that leaves the batch file as is.

Answer 1

The echo directive is executed directly by the running command-prompt instance.
But perl is launching a new process with your command. You need to run your script within a cmd instance, for those commands to work.

Your cmd /c must work. Check if you have spaces in the path you are supplying to it.
You can use a parametrized way of passing arguments,

@array = qw("/c", "path/to/xyz.bat");
system("cmd.exe", @array);

The echo directive is not an executable and hence, it errors out.
The same is true of the copy command also. It is not an executable, while xcopy.exe is.