> Date: Tue, 16 Oct 2012 12:08:53 -0500 > From: "Buchs, Kevin" <[email protected]> > > I have used ediff on an emacs installation on a Windows system I have at > work which has Cygwin installed on it. Ediff works fine there. At home > on a new system (Vista) I have put the latest 24.2.* emacs and installed > Cygwin. If I M-x shell, I can find diff in the Path. Ediff, however, > complains that it cannot find diff. Where does ediff look? I read the > manual and it does not seem to discuss it. I haven't had trouble with my > work system so why does it not just succeed at home?
My crystal ball says that your PATH outside Emacs and exec-path inside Emacs are different, which is probably the consequence of the fact that you mix Cygwin tools with a native Windows port of Emacs. So "M-x shell" invokes the Cygwin Bash, which finds diff in some fake /usr/bin directory, but Emacs looks for diff on PATH, which doesn't include the directory mounted by Cygwin as /usr/bin (or whatever). Keep PATH and exec-path identical, and you will keep your sanity.
