Question

I’m not 100% what is causing this but something is getting past me with the CoffeeScript compiler (coffee.cmd). I just got node.js and CoffeeScript set up on my Windows machine. If I compile a file like so:

coffee.cmd -c test.coffee

I get test.js out perfectly fine. I have a build script set up in Sublime Text 2 that is generalized so I can build from any directory. When it compiles, it uses the full path of the file, like so:

coffee.cmd -c C:\Users\Spencer\test.coffee

Now, this outputs test.js as expected but for some reason, it also creates an empty ‘-p’ in the same directory. I’m not sure exactly why it’s doing this. Any help would be greatly apprectiated. Thanks!

Answer 1

I’m not certain as I don’t have Windows handy but command.coffee has this:

# Write out a JavaScript source file with the compiled code. By default, files
# are written out in `cwd` as `.js` files with the same name, but the output
# directory can be customized with `--output`.
writeJs = (source, js, base) ->
  #...
  path.exists jsDir, (exists) ->
    if exists then compile() else exec "mkdir -p #{jsDir}", compile

And that looks like an excellent candidate for the source of your problem. On a Unixish system (Linux, OSX, FreeBSD, Cygwin, …), mkdir -p will create the desired directory and any intermediate directories that are required. I suspect that the standard Windows mkdir doesn’t know what -p means so it makes two directories instead.

You could fix your local version of the CoffeeScript compiler’s source to use the Windows-specific version of mkdir -p or you could try installing Cygwin to get a mkdir that knows what -p means. Sending a bug report to the CoffeeScript maintainers would be a nice touch too (but probably not necessary since they’ll find this question on their own).