Tim Golden added the comment: On 14/11/2013 00:21, Laurent Birtz wrote: > Is it reasonable to believe that most Python programs don't care > about the legacy shell API?
No more than it is to believe that most Python programs don't care about MSys or Cygwin ;) For information, cmd.exe will happily run, eg, "c:/windows/notepad.exe". The problem is that command-line programs built in to cmd.exe (such as "type" and "dir") expect the slash to prefix a command-line switch. And they don't seem to have particularly good escape- or quote-handling. External command-line tools, like "xcopy", will happily act on forward-slash pathnames as long as they're double-quoted. Now certain of the Windows shell API (and here "shell" means: the visual elements, *not* the cmd/PS command shell) will only operate on backslash-separated paths. For example: SHILCreateFromPath: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/bb762210(v=vs.85).aspx I'm not exactly how much that affects the current discussion, but my point is that there *are* places in Windows where the backslash is the only acceptable separator. Changing os.sep globally is real no-no. it has the potential to break a *lot* of code and we're in no position to assess how it's been used. Applying a change conditionally might be acceptable, but somone would have to work out how we knew what environment we were in. TJG ---------- _______________________________________ Python tracker <rep...@bugs.python.org> <http://bugs.python.org/issue6208> _______________________________________ _______________________________________________ Python-bugs-list mailing list Unsubscribe: https://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-bugs-list/archive%40mail-archive.com
