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From: Jim Janney <jjanney@shell.xmission.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.java.programmer
Subject: Re: Space in 'My Documents' directory not fixed by quoting or \ escaping
Date: Tue, 29 May 2012 16:37:00 -0600
Organization: absinthe will make my art grow stronger
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glen herrmannsfeldt <gah@ugcs.caltech.edu> writes:

> Lew <lewbloch@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> (snip)
>>> But since using "/" as a path element seprator in a command line
>>> will cause trouble, people tend to avoid using them as such.
>
>> That is interesting to me. What trouble?
>
>> I have used forward slashes as path element separators in Windows 
>> command-line commands. I don't recall that it caused any trouble.
>
> The system calls, such as OPEN, accept either / or \.
> (C programmers use / for #include files, knowing it will work
> on unix or DOS/Windows, at least since DOS 3.2.)
>
> The system command line utilities, such as DIR and COPY use / for
> options, and won't accept it as part of a file path.
>
> Other command line utilities (that don't come with DOS/Windows)
> that don't use / for options likely will accept /.
>
> The Sourceforge UNXUTILS, unix-like utilities for WIN32, 
> for example, should accept /.

In early versions of MS-DOS you could put a line in CONFIG.SYS to set
the switch character to something else, usually -, which then freed up /
for use in file names.  This eventually went away, I don't remember
exactly when.  The problem was never in the API but in user code that
parsed command lines.

-- 
Jim Janney