find-dired

[Wolter Bernd]

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In GNU Emacs 21.1.1 (i386-msvc-nt4.0.1381)
 of 2001-10-24 on SPARKYBEAR
configured using `configure --with-msvc (12.00)'
Important settings:
  value of $LC_ALL: nil
  value of $LC_COLLATE: nil
  value of $LC_CTYPE: nil
  value of $LC_MESSAGES: nil
  value of $LC_MONETARY: nil
  value of $LC_NUMERIC: nil
  value of $LC_TIME: nil
  value of $LANG: DEU
  locale-coding-system: iso-latin-1
  default-enable-multibyte-characters: nil

Please describe exactly what actions triggered the bug
and the precise symptoms of the bug:

I use the above binary of emacs21 under WinNt4 SP6 (and also under
Win95) together with cygnus-bash (cygwin-b20). When I do ´M-x
find-name-dired' I get the following error message in the *Find*
buffer:

,----
|   c:/:
|   find . \( -name '.emacs' \) -exec ls -ld {} \;
|   /cygnus/cygwin-b20/H-i586-cygwin32/bin/bash.exe: -c: line 1: syntax error 
near unexpected token `\\('
|   /cygnus/cygwin-b20/H-i586-cygwin32/bin/bash.exe: -c: line 1: `find . \\( 
-name '.emacs' \\) -exec ls -ld {} \\;'
|   
| find exited abnormally with code 2 at Fri Nov 30 11:37:45
`----

I set debug-on-entry for find-dired and stepped through the program up
to:

,----
| * start-process("find" #<buffer *Find*> "bash.exe" "-c" "find . \\( -name 
'.emacs' \\) -exec ls -ld {} \\;")
`----

where bash produced the error-message quoted above.

Two things I checked additionally:

if I cut the ´find . \( -name...' line from the error message and do
´M-x shell' and paste it there it will run without problems.

I also checked ´find-name-dired' in emacs20.4 with the exact same
bash-setup as in 21 with debug-on-entry and there emacs passes exactly
the same start-process arg-list to bash and it completes without a
hitch!

I tried to track where the additional quoting is done
(start-process-shell-command) and replaced the double quotes with
single one - then bash gets to see the ´( -name '.emacs' )' part
without quotes at all which will result in a different error. I
replaced the 21 ´start-process-shell-command' with the one from 20.4 -
same error as above.

It seems to happen on the way from start-process to the shell on a
very low level I don't have access to.

I read about problems with start-process in etc/PROBLEMS and changed
the start-process call in subr.el to call-process - same error.

If I can do any additional checking, debugging or backtracing I'd be
glad to oblige since I really miss this sorely.

All the best

Bernd Wolter