Bug with empty environment

[BobbyAnguelov]

I was having an issue where starting a process via you lib was failing in a strange way. After debugging I realized that there is a subtle bug in how you call CreateProcessA. By default you do this:

char *used_environment = SUBPROCESS_NULL;

Which is then fed into the CreateProcessFunction, except instead of it receiving a nullptr, it receives a valid ptr to an empty string. This breaks the semantics so ends up running the process with an empty environment instead of using the inherited environment.

I hacked it as follows just to get it to work, but I'm not entirely sure what the idiomatic c way to that is (I'm mostly a c++ prog).

I did this at the CreateProcessA callsite: ( used_environment[0] == SUBPROCESS_NULL ) ? SUBPROCESS_NULL : used_environment

[sheredom]

Nice find! I'll have a look.

[sheredom]

Can I check - did you run it with subprocess_option_inherit_environment?

[BobbyAnguelov]

I just called it as follows:

subprocess_create( processCommandLineArgs, subprocess_option_combined_stdout_stderr, &m_subProcess );

No other options.

Looking at the code again, I probably should have used the option: subprocess_option_inherit_environment 🤦

[sheredom]

Ah I think this is by design then.

If you don't have subprocess_option_inherit_environment set and environment is NULL, it'll launch the process with an empty environment.

[BobbyAnguelov]

yup, me being an idiot is definitely by design...

Might be good to add it to examples/readme. I completely missed it the first time round and assume it would do the same as the CreateProcess i.e. inherit environment by default.

[sheredom]

Aye I'll add some extra docs, good idea!