Tuesday, 11 May 2010

How to Fix Emacs Windows Error - Spawning Child Process - Invalid Argument

Emacs Error Message - spawning child process: invalid argument
  • When you call the shell
  • When you call the compiler, such as mingw32-make
Details
  • Emacs Version 23.1 for Windows
  • Windows XP Professional Service Pack 3
  • Powershell Version 1
Solution
  1. Go to the windows console
  2. Enter the command "set" to bring up your system variables
  3. I had shell=c:\progra~1\rational\ration~1\nutcroot\mksnt\sh.exe
  4. Enter "set shell=" to remove the variable
  5. Try Emacs again
Tips
  • Anonymous commentator (18/6/11) found the cause of the error to be a different environmental variable, MKS. I suggest that you examine your other environmental variables if changing SHELL or MKS does not work for you.
Notes
  • This took me a long time to fix and a caused me a lot of stress
  • Please leave a comment if you found this useful
Labels:

7 comments:

  1. Anonymous2 January 2011 at 15:16

    Thanks for sharing your fix to the problem.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Binh Nguyen4 January 2011 at 16:46

    Hi Anonymous,

    Thanks for leaving a comment. Much appreciated :)

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous10 February 2011 at 03:35

    Thank you so much for sharing and saving me a lot of trouble.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Binh Nguyen10 February 2011 at 14:21

    Hi Anonymous,

    Glad you found this useful. It was driving me nuts for quite a while.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Anonymous18 June 2011 at 01:22

    I got the same error message. Although the exact fix is a little bit different: the MKS environment variable was pointing to the wrong place, this article nevertheless did give me some hint as where to look.

    Thank you.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Binh Nguyen20 June 2011 at 14:26

    Thanks anonymous (18/6/11) for leaving a comment about your experience. I wonder what the MKS variable is for Windows and for Emacs.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Binh Nguyen18 February 2013 at 03:14

    Hi Frazer,

    My parents are Vietnamese and I was born in Melbourne Australia.

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)