run-command: treat inaccessible directories as ENOENT

When execvp reports EACCES, it can be one of two things:

  1. We found a file to execute, but did not have
     permissions to do so.

  2. We did not have permissions to look in some directory
     in the $PATH.

In the former case, we want to consider this a
permissions problem and report it to the user as such (since
getting this for something like "git foo" is likely a
configuration error).

In the latter case, there is a good chance that the
inaccessible directory does not contain anything of
interest. Reporting "permission denied" is confusing to the
user (and prevents our usual "did you mean...?" lookup). It
also prevents git from trying alias lookup, since we do so
only when an external command does not exist (not when it
exists but has an error).

This patch detects EACCES from execvp, checks whether we are
in case (2), and if so converts errno to ENOENT. This
behavior matches that of "bash" (but not of simpler shells
that use execvp more directly, like "dash").

Test stolen from Junio.

Signed-off-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>

1 files changed, 13 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/t/t0061-run-command.sh b/t/t0061-run-command.sh
index 8d4938f01..17e969df6 100755
--- a/t/t0061-run-command.sh
+++ b/t/t0061-run-command.sh
@@ -34,4 +34,17 @@ test_expect_success POSIXPERM 'run_command reports EACCES' '
 	grep "fatal: cannot exec.*hello.sh" err
 '
 
+test_expect_success POSIXPERM 'unreadable directory in PATH' '
+	mkdir local-command &&
+	test_when_finished "chmod u+rwx local-command && rm -fr local-command" &&
+	git config alias.nitfol "!echo frotz" &&
+	chmod a-rx local-command &&
+	(
+		PATH=./local-command:$PATH &&
+		git nitfol >actual
+	) &&
+	echo frotz >expect &&
+	test_cmp expect actual
+'
+
 test_done