Funny, no?

Indeed is tricky to be cross platform friendly and I believe the work from Daniel Berger (win32utils) and some other stuff should have been part of standard ruby distribution long time ago, replacing the POSIX only version they have.

The example I provided will work, but the problem is that for files like ‘gem’ and ‘gem.bat’ will find the first one and call it without extension.

On 1.8.6-p114 this wouldn’t work, on newest versions works without issues.

Other problem is that File.executable? think everything can be executed on Windows… such a lame support

Other examples would be using some of Daniel Berger’s excellent platform abstraction libraries (eg sys-*), and maybe integrating stuff like win32-process et al so that Process is more platform neutral.

I think your example highlights the difficultly of writing portable code (which is probably why many of us often don’t bother). I think the example won’t work on windows due to executable extensions. Maybe something like this:

def where(app)
pathext = (ENV['PATHEXT'] || ‘.COM;.EXE;.BAT;.CMD’).split(‘;’) if RUBY_PLATFORM =~ /win32/
ENV['PATH'].split(File::PATH_SEPARATOR).each do |path|
fn = File.join(path, app)
if pathext
pathext.each { |ext| return fn + ext if File.exist?(fn + ext) and File.executable?(fn + ext) }
else
return fn if File.exist?(fn) and File.executable?(fn)
end
end
nil
end