I spent a bit of my holiday trying to get some more tests working on the Windows port. Unfortunately I hit some unexpected and deep snags. I'm writing down these thoughts before I forget them. nbdkit runs shell scripts from a lot of places. The places which are important for tests are: (a) nbdkit --run 'script'. (b) linuxdisk plugin (used to create tests/disk, so important for tests) runs "du" and "mke2fs -d" commands. On Unix-like platforms these use system(3), and they also do in the Windows port since Win32 also has system(). When running on actual Windows the commands are run through CMD.EXE as you'd expect. Of course Windows doesn't have the rich and powerful shell environment that Unix has so there's no way for nbdkit --run to work exactly the same on Windows as it does on Unix, but that's all to be expected. More interesting for running the tests is what happens when running under Wine on Linux. I imagined that Linux -> Wine nbdkit.exe -> system ("qemu-img ...") would work by the Windows process running the Unix command directly. Unfortunately that's not how it works at all. In fact Wine emulates system() using CMD.EXE, and so none of the tests as written will work. It's possible to get system() under Wine to run Unix commands, but complicated to say the least: https://stackoverflow.com/a/45545068 However even if we get that lot to work, there's still a big catch. Paths are generally rewritten using nbdkit_realpath which on Windows returns paths like "C:\Windows\Temp\socket". Wheneven these appear in variables (eg. $unixsocket, $uri, and variables passed to the linuxdisk plugin subcommands) these will make no sense to the Unix commands we want to run. In summary, a test which does: nbdkit .. --run 'qemu-img info "$uri"' will currently try to run: CMD.EXE /C qemu-img info 'nbd+unix:///?socket=C:\Windows\Temp\sock' [Note that on actual Windows, assuming qemu-img.exe is available, I would expect this to work, although we still need to adjust how variables are set in the script fragment we pass to system(). The problem is not how to get this to work on Windows, but how to get it to work under Wine on Linux so we can run more tests.] Even if we resolve the problem with running shell commands, it will still not work because it will run: qemu-img info 'nbd+unix:///?socket=C:\Windows\Temp\sock' Rich. -- Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones Read my programming and virtualization blog: http://rwmj.wordpress.com virt-top is 'top' for virtual machines. Tiny program with many powerful monitoring features, net stats, disk stats, logging, etc. http://people.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-top