Program executed using QProcess fails to start

Question

I'm trying to execute a process using QProcess on Windows, but it keeps failing to start. Here's the code I'm using:

env = QtCore.QProcessEnvironment.systemEnvironment()

proc = QtCore.QProcess()
proc.setProcessEnvironment(env)

proc.start('chef-solo --version') # works on command line
# proc.start('\\opscode\\chef\\bin\\chef-solo --version') # works on command line
# proc.start('c:\\opscode\\chef\\bin\\chef-solo --version') # works on command line
# proc.start('chef-solo', '--version') # doesn't work (no command line analog)
# proc.start('chef-solo', ['--version']) # doesn't work (no command line analog)
# proc.start('ping www.google.com') # works!

if not proc.waitForStarted():
    print "didn't start", proc.error()

This invariably prints didn't start 0. proc.error() is 0, proc.readAllStandardError() and proc.readAllStandardOutput() are empty. The PATH variable is set correctly in env, and besides I'm specifying the full path to the program. What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

It turns out, there's both a chef-solo and a chef-solo.bat in the chef directory. Running chef-solo on the command line executes chef-solo.bat. This doesn't work through QProcess, where you have to explicitly list chef-solo.bat in order for it to run the program.