Moreover, I'm not a Win32 developer, but I don't see the difference between Win32 and Unix for this particular issue. In my understanding, you have to escape/quote stuff with spaces in both worlds.

Here is where problem arise - in Windows shell (cmd.exe) there is no robust and correct way to escape spaces or other character, which could be quoted. The quoting rules are insane: if you have space within parameter, then that parameter should be enclosed into doublequotes. If it contains doublequotes, those doublequotes should be doubled to be treated as single quotes; and even these rules are twisted: there is escape character '^' which sometimes suddenly disappears from command line, as it treated specially.

To make things much worse, all rules are changed by some registry settings, and these registry settings could not be used to make escaping scheme sane; maximum you can get is another level of incompatibility.

These and other similar quirks are described in README.WIN32 file from within perl source distribution, quite interesting to read.

In reply to Re^5: The Evil Embedded Space by Courage
in thread The Evil Embedded Space by Intrepid

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