Tony, thanks for explaining. Also thanks for the good work you're putting down (I can't wait to get going with Immerse, inspired by the youtube video). 'Shell' is not a clearly defined term and is only misleading when one, like me, assumed that the shell is the parent process of Julia. I have looked into base.convert.jl in addition to trying to understand what you write, but the c-calls and pointers is a couple of levels deeper than where I am now.
I hope the tests below can point to a solution; note this issue (whichever program to blame) currently stop the potentially production-boosting atom client from connecting consistently to julia on this system. It took a while to reproduce the exact behaviour above. But finally, 5) below is the 'terminal' context of the first post. Julia 0.4.2, 0.4.1 and 0.4.0 all produce different results in context 5). But all reported below are 0.4.2 results. 1) Windows 10.0.10586 64 bit->Start->type cmd. Two choices pop up: 'Command prompt (desktop app), and 'Anaconda Command Prompt'. I choose the non-anaconda one. This is a shortcut with target '%windir%\system32\cmd.exe'. It starts with prompt 'c:\users\F>'. DIR works. LS, PWD and GIT don't work. My PATH includes 'c:\users\f\appdata\local\julia-0.4.2\bin'. I type Julia. pwd() yields 'c:\\users\\f'. homedir() yields the same. I type ;pwd, ;dir and ;ls and all three produce the error in the first post. 2) Same as 1), but I choose the 'Anaconda' terminal. 'c:\users\f' is replaced with 'c:\jpa\Anaconda'. Same behaviour as 1) except for the path. 3) Start-> PowerShell (desktop app). This is a shortcut with target '%SystemRoot%\system32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe'. The window caption says 'Windows Power Shell'. The text heading says ...2015 Microsoft.... The prompt says 'PS C:\Users\F>'. LS, PWD and DIR works. GIT does not work. Same Julia behaviour as 1) 4) Start-> Git shell (desktop app). This is a shortcut with target 'C:\Users\F\AppData\Local\GitHub\GitHub.appref-ms --open-shell'. The window caption says 'c:\windows\system32\windowsPowershell\v1.0\powershell.exe'. The heading is identical to 3), but the prompt says 'c:\users\f\documents\github>' without the PS prefix. LS, DIR, PWD and GIT all work. In Julia, pwd() yields 'C:\\Users\\F\\Documents\\GitHub'. homedir() yields 'C:\\Users\\F'. ;ls, ;dir and ;pwd work too. 5) Logout F, login Fro. With this user, the git shell preference is the 'MS-DOS style' shell. Start-> Git shell (desktop app). This is a shortcut with target 'C:\Users\Fro\AppData\Local\GitHub\GitHub.appref-ms --open-shell'. The window caption says 'c:\windows\system32\cmd.exe'. The promt says 'c:\users\fro\documents\github>'. LS yields no output at all. DIR works. PWD 'is not recognized as an internal or external command'. GIT works. In Julia, pwd() yields 'C:\\Users\\Fro\\Documents\\GitHub'. homedir() yields 'C:\\Users\\Fro'. ;ls works. ;dir and ;pwd yields the error in the first post.
