Spawning child process: invalid argument

[Wai Jing]

I am trying to get gnu emacs + slime working on my window desktop, but I am
getting
Spawning child process: invalid argument

whenever I try M-x slime or M-x run-lisp

thanks if anyone can help

[David Bindel]

Have you added lines like these to your .emacs file?

(setq inferior-lisp-program "the path to your Lisp system")
(add-to-list 'load-path "the path of your `slime' directory")
(require 'slime)
(slime-setup)

If you don't feel attached to an existing Emacs on your machine, you
might check out the "Lisp in a Box" project at:

http://common-lisp.net/project/lispbox/

I haven't tried it personally, but it looks like they have a nice
installation system for setting up Emacs + SLIME + one of several Lisp
packages.

Cheers,
David

[jeff]

Yea, it was after I added those lines into my _emacs file did it gave me a
Spawning child error. If I didn't add those lines and try M-x run-lisp or
M-x slime, it gives me an error saying something like "No such file or
directory, lisp"

"David Bindel" <dbi...@eecs.berkeley.edu> wrote in message
news:dfa2bd$2m28$1...@agate.berkeley.edu...

[David Bindel]

Which version of Emacs are you using, and what file did you point to for
the inferior Lisp program? The things that I can think of that might
cause the problem are (i) the path is malformed somehow, or (ii) the
file that it's pointing to isn't the right executable.

Have you tried to run the Lisp program from a shell?

David

[Matthew Small]

David Bindel <dbi...@eecs.berkeley.edu> writes:

I definately recommend getting the lisp-in-a-box.
It was very easy to be up and running right away.

[clarkel...@gmail.com]

I had this same problem when I migrated from Win7 to Windows 10. Because Win10 was being so difficult about permissions for the drive I moved everything from the C:\ drive to my Users\FirstName Lastname\ABCL\ directory because I was lazy. M-x run-lisp no longer worked (and so neither did SLIME). I moved my (ABCL) lisp implementation back to C:\ABCL\ and everything worked fine. I've had to get some work done so didn't bother diagnosing the problem further but it probably has something to do with the space in my User directory name, or whatever.

Good luck.

GNU Emacs 26.1 / ABCL 1.3.3