whatnow cooks up strings for executing external commands, and then

feeds these strings to popen or system.  These command strings rely on
$SHELL being present - and if that is not the case, then we get weird
error messages ("sh: -c not found" or similar).  (Because both
system() and popen() start up fine with the std shell, but their arg
string to parse doesn't include a cmdname/path before the -c.)

As far as i understand the POSIX standard, SHELL is recommended but
not actually mandatory, so i think it would be good to handle this a
bit more robustly: by setting SHELL to /bin/sh if not present.

diff --git a/uip/whatnowsbr.c b/uip/whatnowsbr.c
index 1d21bd3..121a79b 100644 (file)
--- a/uip/whatnowsbr.c
+++ b/uip/whatnowsbr.c
@@ -605,6 +605,11 @@ system_in_dir(const char *dir, const char *cmd)
 {
     char olddir[BUFSIZ];
     int r;
+
+    /* ensure that $SHELL exists, as the cmd was written relying on
+       a non-blank $SHELL... */
+    setenv("SHELL","/bin/sh",0); /* don't overwrite */
+
     if (getcwd(olddir, sizeof(olddir)) == 0)
        adios("getcwd", "could not get working directory");
     if (chdir(dir) != 0)
@@ -621,6 +626,11 @@ popen_in_dir(const char *dir, const char *cmd, const char *type)
 {
     char olddir[BUFSIZ];
     FILE *f;
+
+    /* ensure that $SHELL exists, as the cmd was written relying on
+       a non-blank $SHELL... */
+    setenv("SHELL","/bin/sh",0); /* don't overwrite */
+    
     if (getcwd(olddir, sizeof(olddir)) == 0)
        adios("getcwd", "could not get working directory");
     if (chdir(dir) != 0)