The OS does not assign negative values "a special meaning"

I never said it did. The code I posted comes from Perl's win32/win32.c, not the OS. Negative values returned from Perl's win32_spawn mean the spawn failed.

Equally, the OS returns 32-bits of information. Perl reduces this to 8-bits.

No. As shown, that never occurs when you get that warning.

In reply to Re^8: Can't spawn "cmd.exe": by ikegami
in thread Can't spawn "cmd.exe": by emalossi

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