mozilla/rust — pull request #11784 by eminence (2014-01-25 01:38:38+00:00)
Title: Use an absolute path in test_process_output_fail_to_start

This test is designed to ensure that running a non-existent executable
results in a correct error message (FileNotFound in this case of this
test). However, if you try to run an executable that doesn't exist, and
that requires searching through the $PATH, and one of the $PATH components
is not readable, then a PermissionDenied error will be returned, instead
of FileNotFound.

Using an absolute path skips the $PATH search logic in exec, thus by-passing the logic in exec that would have returned a PermissionDenied

In the specific case of my machine, /usr/bin/games was part of $PATH, but my user account wasn't in the games group (thus being unable to read /usr/bin/games)

See the man pages for execv and execve for more details.

I've tested this on Linux and OSX, and I am fairly certain that there will be no problems on Windows