ERL-98: The "erl" and "werl" commands does not work with the "-detached" flag in Windows environment

[OTP-Maintainer]

Original reporter: premanand.thangamani@erlang-solutions.com
Affected version: OTP-18.0
Component: erts
Migrated from: https://bugs.erlang.org/browse/ERL-98

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Hi,
     Starting an Erlang node in detached mode (via the flag "-detached") in the Windows environment seems to be failing intermittently. Following is a more detailed explanation of the problem.

Environment:   
    Windows 7 with OTP 18.0.
    Windows 2008 Server Enterprise Edition with OTP 18.0.

Problem Description: 
    Running the following commands 

  erl -name alpha@myhostname -setcookie somecookie -detached
  werl -name alpha@myhostname -setcookie somecookie -detached

in the above mentioned environments does not start the erlang nodes in detached mode (i.e. as background processes) sometimes i.e. the failure is intermittent.

Unfortunately, the command execution does not produce any error output. This issue was noticed in the RabbitMQ product.

Thanks.
Premanand Thangamani.
Erlang Solutions AB.

[OTP-Maintainer]

lukas said:

This seems to be because of a pathing problem in the cmd shell, don't know how to solve this yet. A workaround is running erl with an absolute path or in a msys/cygwin shell.

[OTP-Maintainer]

lichengteng said:

Hi Lukas, I still couldn't do it with your workaround by running erl with an absolute path. The command I intended to run was "werl -pa ebin -s myapp start -detached". If I removed the "-detached" flag, I could have seen my app started properly. I followed your instructions and changed it to "D:\erl9.0\bin\werl -pa ebin -s myapp start -detached". The kernel application was on, but not my own app. Also, I got no error displayed on my cmd console. What was I missing here? Also, I have tried with cygwin using command "erl -pa ebin -s myapp start -detached" and my app didn't start.
Environment: Windows 7, CMD.exe, Erlang 20, rebar2.
I'm looking forward to your reply!

[bjorng]

I am closing this issue because of its age. Feel free to reopen it if the problem still exists in OTP 23.