2009/4/8 Alexandre Julliard <julli...@winehq.org>: > Luke Benstead <kaz...@gmail.com> writes: > >> This is probably a really dumb question... but why does wine support >> UNIX paths? What is the circumstance where a Windows application will >> be trying to access a native file or directory? The only example I can >> think of is that an app has specifically been written to be used in >> Wine, in which case, shouldn't native UNIX paths be disabled by >> default, and perhaps turned on with an environment variable? > > It can be used anywhere an app uses a user-specified path without > mangling it too much; admittedly that doesn't happen very often, apps > like to mangle paths. There are also places where Wine itself depends on > it, to support things like "wine ~/foo.exe" or to allow Unix paths in > some registry entries. > > These are all things that could probably be reimplemented in a more > reliable fashion, for instance by using \\?\unix instead of relying on > the path detection heuristic. Once this is done properly everywhere, > then maybe the hackish way could be removed. > > -- > Alexandre Julliard > julli...@winehq.org >
That sounds like a far better way of doing it. Perhaps though, if that method was implemented, passing a program path directly into wine (wine ~/foo.exe) would be a special case (without a \\?\ prefix). From a users point of view that's what I'd expect, as you haven't yet started the application (and entered windows land :) ). Luke.