On 05/10/2014 07:23 PM, Chris Angelico wrote:
There is a broad convention that spaces in file names get protected with quotes, though (for instance, tab completion will put quotes around them), so it's not complete chaos.
"Complete chaos" is a pretty good description, especially since MS decided to make the default directory paths for many things have embedded spaces in them. And to change the rules from version to version of the OS. And it's not just the cmd line that's inconsistent; some exec function variants liberally parse unquoted names looking for some file that happens to match the first few 'words" of the string.
I once debugged a customer problem (without actually seeing the machine), and told tech support to ask him if he had a file in the root directory called "program.exe." I turned out to be right, and the customer was sure I must have hacked into his machine.
There was a bug in our code (missing quotes), masked by the liberality of the function I mentioned, that wasn't visible till such a file existed.
The customer symptom? Our code complained that the linker couldn't be found.
-- DaveA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
