Question

I am working on the command line in the console window using Ant, Java, and CVSNT. (Unix geek forced to live in a Windows world)

When I run a cvsnt command, batch scripts no longer work. This includes several commands that I use including ant and vim.

I can open up a new console window, and in that window, everything is fine, so it must be something about that particular environment in that console window, and it happens whenever I do something in cvsnt.

Any ideas? Anything I should be looking for?

Answer 1

I had the exact same problem today. The problem is that cvs.exe does something with the code page. I cannot explain quite what but if you reset the code page, bat files start working again.

An example may make this clearer (being in the UK, my default code page is 850, but the same thing happens when I have my Windows default as 437)

>echo @echo .bat files are working > test.bat

>test.bat
.bat files are working

>chcp
Active code page: 850

>cvs update
? test.bat
cvs update: Updating .

>test.bat

>chcp
Active code page: 850

>test.bat

>chcp 850
Active code page: 850

>test.bat
.bat files are working

>

so although the code page is apparently unaffected, resetting it restores the functionality of .bat files.

To work around this problem, I am therefore using a script like this:

@echo off
(
chcp 850 > NUL
"C:\Program Files\CVSNT\cvs.exe" %*
chcp 850 > NUL
)

and invoking cvs through it. If anyone can comment on why this code-page behaviour is occurring I would be most interested to know.