Regards
Friedrich

Here's a more full report.

Suppose in dired you have a a file named x.txt.gz, and you move your
cursor to it, then press Z. Emacs will ask you “Compress or uncompress
x.txt.gz? (y or n)”. Answer y should uncompress the file, as the
expected behavior.

I have “gunzip” installed by cygwin at “C:\cygwin\bin”. In emacs, when
you do a “shell-command” then “which gunzip”, the output is “/usr/bin/
gunzip”. This means, emacs can find the file.

The content of that file is:
«
#!/bin/sh
PATH=${GZIP_BINDIR-'/usr/bin'}:$PATH
exec gzip -d "$@"
»

Here's the problem. When i do Z, i get this error:
“apply: Searching for program: no such file or directory, gunzip”.

This is odd and shouldn't happen, since the file is right there and
emacs can find the file by “which gunzip”.

if i rename the file to gunzip.bat, then i do Z in dired on the file,
i get this error:

«
c:\Users\xah\web\xahlee_org\emacs>#!/bin/sh
'#!' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
operable program or batch file.

c:\Users\xah\web\xahlee_org\emacs>PATH=${GZIP_BINDIR-'/usr/bin'}:
$PATH

c:\Users\xah\web\xahlee_org\emacs>exec gzip -d "$@"
'exec' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
operable program or batch file.
Failed to compressc:/Users/xah/web/xahlee_org/emacs/xxxx.txt.gz
»

So, apparantly, emacs can find the program now, but for some mixed
reasons of Windows cmd.exe and cygwin bash and emacs, it seems to run
it as win cmd.exe script and not bash. I suppose this is expected
behavior.

if i rename the file to gunzip.sh, i get this error:

«apply: Searching for program: no such file or directory, gunzip»

the value of my exec-suffixes is
(".exe" ".com" ".bat" ".cmd" ".btm" "")
after changing it to
(".exe" ".com" ".bat" ".cmd" ".btm" ".sh" "")

still same error.

Renaming the file to gunzip.exe wont work because .exe files needs to
be in certain format.

Note that also even if renaming to gunzip.bat or gunzip.sh worked for
this emacs usage situation, that probably isn't a good solution
because it will probably break cygwin, since in unix shell it is
expected to be just “gunzip” not “gunzip.bat” or “gunzip.sh”. So, if
renaming can work for emacs, possibly i'll just create it else where
and put it in a different path...

am i missing something?

does Z in dired on a compressed file work for anyone in Windows?

  Xah
∑ http://xahlee.org/

  Xah
∑ http://xahlee.org/

@echo off
gzip -d %1

thanks to Eli and others.

I filed a bug report to FSF on this. #4867. I think this should still
considered a bug though. Considering it as a Windows OS problem isn't
very helpful in solving this. I'm sure if similar problems happens in
linux that's OS issue, people probably will not look at it as “Oh,
it's OS issue, emacs doesn't need to deal with it”.

  Xah
∑ http://xahlee.org/