What is wrong with the name excel?

[Tony Richardson]

On Fri, Apr 17, 2020 at 1:02 PM Eliot Moss <moss@cs.umass.edu> wrote:

> On 4/17/2020 1:24 PM, Erik Soderquist via Cygwin wrote:
> > On Fri, Apr 17, 2020 at 7:11 AM Gerlach van Beinum wrote:
> >>
> >> I made a program to read a csv file from Excel. I called it excel.c
> >> and it made an executable excel.exe
> >> If irun that executable with:
> >> ./excel.exe
> >> nothing happens, i.i. no output.
> >>
> >> If I rename it to a.exe it runs OK.
> >>
> >> What about this name excel??
> >
> > I believe this is actually a Windows issue; Windows recognizes
> > "excel.exe" as 'a Microsoft package' and intercepts the call to launch
> > the program, though I would expect Microsoft Excel to launch rather
> > than 'nothing happening'
> >
> > I've had this problem before on hosts that did not even have Cygwin
> > installed when the executable file name matched an existing 'Microsoft
> > package'
>
> What seems a little odd to me is this.  If I had invoked via:
>
>      excel.exe
>
> I would not be surprised the MS Excel would launch, because it is probably
> earlier in the path.  But the OP said he typed:
>
>      ./excel.exe
>
> So I am surprised, given the explicit path.  Which leads me to a background
> wondering of whether ./excel.exe has execute permission set.  If not maybe
> the search would continue, trying to find something on the path that could
> be executed?  That would surprise me a little, but I'd have to go read the
> fine print on bash, etc.
>
> Regards - Eliot Moss
>

I am surprised but, I see the same behavior.   No output from an executable
called excel.exe.  winword.exe appears to be another "special" name.

Tony Richardson