Question

Some background: In my Rails environment I’m using CoffeeScript which uses ExecJS which uses the Windows Scripting Host to execute Javascript files.

Unfortunately I’m experiencing huge delays (> 30 seconds) when my CoffeeScript files are compiled.

Using Process Explorer and Process Monitor I already identified the command line as one of the causes. cscript.exe expects its parameters with double slashes:

cscript //E:jscript //Nologo //U C:/path_to_coffeescript_compiler.js

For some reason cmd.exe (not cscript.exe!) treats the double slashes as double backslashes and tries to resolve the network name of each parameter which obviously fails, but not after some delay.

Here’s a small excerpt of the Process Monitor log:

cmd.exe     CreateFile     \\E:jscript\\             OBJECT PATH INVALID
cmd.exe     CreateFile     \\E:jscript \Nologo\\     BAD NETWORK PATH
cmd.exe     CreateFile     \\E:jscript \Nologo \U\   BAD NETWORK PATH
cmd.exe     CreateFile     \\Nologo\\                OBJECT PATH INVALID
cmd.exe     CreateFile     \\Nologo \U\              BAD NETWORK PATH

… and so on.

What can I do to prevent this?

Answer 1

After I did some more hacking I finally found the problem. The culprit was Comodo Internet Security which injected a DLL into the cmd.exe process which did the lookups:

Help text for the option Do heuristic command-line analysis for certain applications:

Selecting this option instructs Comodo Internet Security to perform heuristic analysis of
programs that are capable of executing code such as visual basic
scripts and java applications. Example programs that are affected by
enabling this option are wscript.exe, cmd.exe, java.exe and javaw.exe.

Thanks to all offering workarounds. The fact that none of these worked guided me into finding the cause 🙂