popen pipes fail when cwd is a UNC path

[Mark Hadfield]

Tim Black wrote:
> In my recent experience, popen os pipes always fail when cwd is a UNC
> path. Can anyone shed any light on this? Although I've seen lots of
> UNC path-related problems in this newsgroup, I've not been able to
> find anything specifically about os pipes and UNC paths.

It's a problem with the Windows command interpreter (cmd.exe on the NT 
family) which gets invoked by popen. To demonstrate this. try cd'ing to 
a UNC path. You will get a message like

'\\foo\bar' is an invalid current directory path.  UNC paths are not 
supported.


-- 
Mark Hadfield            "Ka puwaha te tai nei, Hoea tatou"
m.hadfield at niwa.co.nz
National Institute for Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA)