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Document that "exec LIST" and "system LIST" may fall back to the shell on Win32
authorThomas Sibley <tsibley@cpan.org>
Thu, 5 Jun 2014 17:17:42 +0000 (10:17 -0700)
committerTony Cook <tony@develop-help.com>
Sun, 8 Jun 2014 23:45:01 +0000 (09:45 +1000)
commit94d4006a6dfdde1becb6ac3d43bd51a5b9ffd95f
tree3d161a21a9d58f13cb36ea27748e40f9416a5526
parent59b3baca0fd7b0de1c42016474d2ebfe8e8d090e
Document that "exec LIST" and "system LIST" may fall back to the shell on Win32

As noted on p5p [1] and subsequently discussed [2].

The Win32 functions for handling exec() and system() attempt to
specially handle shell builtins by catching spawn failures and
re-attempting the spawn using the shell with the given argument LIST.

If "exec PROGRAM LIST" syntax (or the equivalent for system()) is used,
then only the specified PROGRAM will ever be run (although Perl will
still try the spawn twice on Win32 if PROGRAM doesn't exist or otherwise
can't be executed).

[1] http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl5.porters/2014/04/msg214556.html
[2] http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl5.porters/2014/04/msg214564.html
pod/perlfunc.pod
pod/perlport.pod