Bash fails to run .bat file with spaces in pathname and argument

[Johnathon Jamison]

Christopher Faylor wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 11, 2006 at 07:43:57PM -0700, Johnathon Jamison wrote:
>> Respectfully, I think I know how shell quoting works.  If you look at 
>> the sample run, all spaces are properly escaped with either backslashes 
>> or double quotes.  The problem only surfaces when BOTH the program AND 
>> the argument have spaces, AND the program is a .bat file.  If you run 
>> what I have with only one item containing a space, or use a .sh script, 
>> things work.  Further, if you look at one of my examples, there is no 
>> space in the program being executed; the space is only present in the 
>> current working directory, and so clearly the proper quoting of the 
>> program is not at issue here.
>>
>> I have finally found someone else who has come across the same issue:
>> http://sourceware.org/ml/cygwin/2004-09/msg00081.html
>> Apparently this is a bug in cygwin:
>> http://sourceware.org/ml/cygwin/2004-09/msg00145.html
>> Is anybody working on this?
> 
> You found a message from more than two years ago and are asking if
> anyone is working on the problem?  You must be a pretty optimistic
> person.
> 

Yep, the eternal optimist.  Still hoping for world peace. ;-)

> Cygwin is a linux/UNIX emulation which has some accomodations for native
> Windows things like .bat files.
> 
> The likelihood that any core cygwin developer is going to want to devote
> time or effort into providing workarounds to make things work better for
> Windowsisms like .bat files is not high.  So, if a Windowsism doesn't
> work the way you want it to then you generally have two options 1)
> (preferred) switch to using shell scripts or 2) provide a patch to fix
> the behavior.
> 

I was afraid of that.  The only reason I pursued it this far was that I 
did not write the .bat files; my company did, and I came across this 
during our QA pass.  Looks like I will have to add this as a known issue 
to our docs.  Anyway, thanks for the reply.

> cgf
> 

Lastly, why is CreateProcess used to exec a process instead of _spawnve? 
  It would appear to me on the face of things that _spawnve would get 
around the quoting issues entirely.

Johnathon

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