in reply to Re^3: win32 parenthesis system weirdness
in thread win32 parenthesis system weirdness

Don't think using parenthesis in dirnames is that unusual ;)?! It's not just that single parenthesis at the end that causes this behavior. Paths like this also won't open without that extra space: 
my $fn = q{ C:\img\del me\pic (images)[2k]\00000253.jpg"};

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Tried with perl 5.10 also, but same behaviour: 
#works (note extra space required)
"H:\TEST\ActivePerl-5.10.0.1001-MSWin32-x86-283495\perl\bin\perl.exe" 
+-e "my $fn = ' \"C:\img\del me\three (3\00000253.jpg\"'; system($fn)"

#Doesn't work
"H:\TEST\ActivePerl-5.10.0.1001-MSWin32-x86-283495\perl\bin\perl.exe" 
+-e "my $fn = '\"C:\img\del me\three (3\00000253.jpg\"'; system($fn)"

'C:\img\del' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
operable program or batch file.

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But since this doesn't work either (as mentioned by ikegami): 
cmd.exe /c "C:\img\del me\three (3\00000253.jpg"

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Then I don't consider this whole problem to be perl related.

What I now need to understand is why the "(" char is treated in this special way in windows and what other chars create similar weird behaviour? Didn't think "(" was spcecial "meta-char", like | or > etc, that needed to be escaped (and even escaping it with ^ also didn't work).

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Re^5: win32 parenthesis system weirdness
by BrowserUk (Patriarch) on Dec 04, 2009 at 11:47 UTC

    '(' and ')' are special characters. They are used grouping commands like: 

    >(md x && cd x) || (echo "Couldn't create x" & exit)

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    The rules for how cmd.exe treats quotes (usefully provided by help cmd), are as follows: 

    If /C or /K is specified, then the remainder of the command line after
the switch is processed as a command line, where the following logic i
+s
used to process quote (") characters:

    1.  If all of the following conditions are met, then quote charact
+ers
        on the command line are preserved:

        - no /S switch
        - exactly two quote characters
        - no special characters between the two quote characters,
          where special is one of: &<>()@^|
        - there are one or more whitespace characters between the
          two quote characters
        - the string between the two quote characters is the name
          of an executable file.

    2.  Otherwise, old behavior is to see if the first character is
        a quote character and if so, strip the leading character and
        remove the last quote character on the command line, preservin
+g
        any text after the last quote character.

...
The special characters that require quotes are:
     <space>
     &()[]{}^=;!'+,`~

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      That solved/explained it nicely.

      Thanks BrowserUk.

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