[tex-live] Can't spawn "cmd.exe": No such file or directory at F:/TeXLive/2008/tlpkg/TeXLive/TLUtils.pm line 459.

[Dan Luecking]

Karl:

I get this error only when there are a huge number of files going
into the backup file. The error message is always accompanied by
screen after screen of filenames. I think this might be due to
running tar with all the files listed on the command line. This
might result in buffer overflow and throw Windows into confusion.
The definition of make_container has the following comments
(TLPOBJ.pm):
   # Get list of files.  We have to pass them all on the command line,
   # because there is no portable way to pass them on stdin.  This can be
   # a lengthy command line, but modern systems have enough argv space.
   # our biggest package is tex4ht, which needs about 200k.

tar allows one to pass the list of files in an external file
(--files-from or -T). If the too-long list is the problem, that
would be a way to work around it.

The command line limit for cmd.exe is variously given as 8K characters
(on an interactive command line, before expansion) 16K (after expansion
or if cmd.exe is used non-interactively). There are other claimed
limits, the largest I ran across was 32K. The list of venturisadf files
is about 43K.

venturisadf and context both gave me this same error on update,
and a similarly large list of files in the error message. I ended
up updating both by hand, but setting option autobackup 0 might
work around the problem.

Regards,

Dan
-- 
Daniel H. Luecking
University of Arkansas
Fayetteville, AR