On Wed, Jul 3, 2013 at 10:50 PM, Tim Chase <python.l...@tim.thechases.com> wrote: > On 2013-07-03 09:51, Tim Golden wrote: >> We can certainly agree on this. I can't count the number of emails >> I've deleted as too hot-headed in response to dismissive comments >> about Windows as a platform. Some of them, at least, appear to be >> from people who last actually used Windows back in the 9x days when >> the command window was very limited indeed. > > I guess one of my biggest frustrations with the cmd.exe (and > command.com) interpreters is that argument processing is left to the > application, so each application may do it slightly differently: > > C:\temp\> find weather *.py > FIND: Parameter format not correct > C:\temp\> find "weather" *.py > ---------- WFD.PY > weather = Weather(lat, lon) > C:\temp\> findstr weather *.py > wfd.py: weather = Weather(lat, lon) > C:\temp\> findstr "weather" *.py > wfd.py: weather = Weather(lat, lon) > > And more maddeningly: > > C:\temp\> start file.txt > ... opens the file correctly in Notepad > C:\temp\> start "file with space.txt" > ... opens a new dos box with the name "file with space.txt" rather > than opening the file > C:\temp\> start "" "file with space.txt" > ... opens the file correctly in Notepad > > It's the little inconsistencies like this that wear daily on me. That > and the lack of built-in utilities, so I'm regularly adding GNU tools > on new boxes.
The issue you have there is mainly that the quotes are serving double purpose. Yes, they delimit and thus can be used to surround a file name with spaces in it, but they're also significant to a couple of apps (FIND uses them to indicate the search string, START looks for a quoted argument to use as the title). I'm not entirely sure how it's done under the covers; C code looking at argc/argv sees quoted arguments without their quotes, exactly as I would expect on Unix, and yet the convention is to notice the quotes. The issue with START is 100% understandable and 100% annoying. ChrisA -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
