Re: emacsW32 can't find gunzip

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Xah Lee <xahlee@gmail.com>
> Date: Sat, 11 Jul 2009 22:14:33 -0700 (PDT)
> 
> when using emacsW32, in dired, i press Z to uncompress a file, but i
> got this error:
> 
> apply: Searching for program: no such file or directory, gunzip
> 
> any idea how to fix that?

Make sure gzip.exe is in some directory mentioned in exec-path (inside
Emacs) or in Path (outside Emacs).

> I have cygwin installed. “which gunzip” shows “/usr/bin/gunzip”.

There's no such thing as "/usr/bin/gunzip" on Windows: every absolute
file name must begin with a drive letter or two slashes.  Cygwin hides
the drive letter (and possibly also a few leading directories) to
pretend there's a Posix-standard directory tree on your machine, but
that's an illusion that only Cygwin programs can share.  EmacsW32,
being a native Windows program, cannot.

> Manually gunning gunzip or gzip -d with shell-command works fine.

Probably because your shell is set to the Cygwin shell.  But Z invokes
gzip via call-process, which bypasses the shell, so you need to play
by the Windows rules.