`M-x term' with Emacs on MS Windows: error Spawning child process: invalid argument

Question

whenever I try to launch M-x term from my Windows distribution of GNU Emacs, I get the error:

apply: Spawning child process: invalid argument

Answer 1

I tried to run M-x termfrom a MingW64 emacs with an MSYS2 bash.exe and I got the same error as you got. It is possible to get a little bit further by changing term-exec-1 in term.el to read:

    (apply 'start-process name buffer
           (getenv "SHELL") "-c"
       (format "stty -nl echo rows %d columns %d sane 2>/dev/null;\
if [ $1 = .. ]; then shift; fi; exec \"$@\""
           term-height term-width)
       ".."
       command "-i" switches)))

You need to answer with the MSYS2 shell path which is something like /usr/bin/bash.exe and then you get a terminal. The problem is that the terminal is messed up. The stty command doesn't work on it and the cr doesn't work. Also, the cd emacs function receives MSYS2 paths like /c/usr/share/emacs/ which are not valid. This function needs to be advised to transform those paths to Windows paths.