🐛 Bug: mocha fails with spawn EINVAL on windows with node 22

[maxonfjvipon]

Bug Report Checklist

• I have read and agree to Mocha's Code of Conduct and Contributing Guidelines
• I have searched for related issues and issues with the faq label, but none matched my issue.
• I have 'smoke tested' the code to be tested by running it outside the real test suite to get a better sense of whether the problem is in the code under test, my usage of Mocha, or Mocha itself.
• I want to provide a PR to resolve this

Expected

Tests with mochajs successfully start to execute without errors on GHA CI on windows

Actual

CI fails with:

Running "mochacli:test" (mochacli) task
Warning: spawn EINVAL  Use --force to continue.

Aborted due to warnings.

Tests are not even started to execute.

Example of failed pipeline: https://github.com/objectionary/eo2js/actions/runs/9693490408/job/26749043096

Minimal, Reproducible Example

I run just regular js tests via GHA on windows using Gruntfile.js:

module.exports = function(grunt) {
  grunt.initConfig({
    pkg: grunt.file.readJSON('package.json'),
    clean: ['temp'],
    mochacli: {
      test: {
        options: {
          timeout: '1200000',
          files: ['test/**/*.test.js', '!test/resources/**'],
        },
      },
    }
  })
  grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-mocha-cli')
  grunt.registerTask('default', ['mochacli'])
}

regular.test.js:

const assert = require('assert')

it('', function() {
  assert.ok(true)
})

Versions

• Tests run via GHA
• OS: windows-latest
• node_modules/.bin/mocha --version: 10.5.2
• node --version: 22

Full CI script is here

Additional Info

My little research tells me that issue is related to April node security release and can be resolved by passing { shell: true } option to spawn function. But here there's no such option. I think the problem may be here

[voxpelli]

Our windows tests passes? See eg. #5185. Are you sure this issue is with mocha and not with grunt? Since its grunt that's invoked initially:

cd eo2js-runtime && grunt

[voxpelli]

And the code path that calls

mocha/bin/mocha.js

Line 105 in b2a6358

const proc = spawn(process.execPath, args, {

is triggered in the tests eg here, so if mocha is failing it should show in these tests I think

mocha/test/integration/esm.spec.js

Line 75 in 819b172

const err = await runMochaAsync(fixture, ['--unhandled-rejections=warn'], {

Maybe its this spawn that you are hitting instead? https://github.com/Rowno/grunt-mocha-cli/blob/be6eeb40cac537b8b016c6693956574ab153a59c/lib/index.js#L127