Re^3: moving from mac to PC

[afoken]

... use slashes, not backslashes. WIN understand both ...

... except on the command line or with respect to anything handled by the command line interpreter

The only real problem is the command interpreter. But if you use the command interpreter, your code is already far from being portable.

How external programs handle command line arguments depends on the individual program. Most programs with a DOS legacy treat the forward slash as switch introducing character, as do many programs written for Windows. But programs from other platforms have no problems with forward slashes in file names on the command line.

Alexander

[Discipulus]

I suspect that this is related to internal commands infact when you say individual program i suspect that internal commands do not like slashes, while all other ones accept both slashes and backslashes.

See ss64.com where internal commands have a dot after the name.

Given that dir and type are internal commands and ls (UnxUtils version) and icacls are not, you can see the difference:

# dir not OK
perl -wMstrict -le "my $path = 'c:/scripts/resized';my @dirs = `dir $p
+ath`;print qq(@dirs)"
Formato del parametro non corretto - "scripts".

# ls OK
perl -wMstrict -le "my $path = 'c:/scripts/resized';my @dirs = `ls $pa
+th`;print qq(@dirs)"
# OK long output omitted

#type not OK
perl -wMstrict -le "my $path = 'c:/scripts/resized/zen-small.pl';my @d
+irs = `type $path`; print qq(@dirs)"
c:/scripts/resized/zen-small.pl not found

# icacls OK
perl -wMstrict -le "my $path = 'c:/scripts/resized';my @dirs = `icacls
+ $path`;print @dirs"
c:/scripts/resized BUILTIN\Administrators:(I)(F)
                   BUILTIN\Administrators:(I)(OI)(CI)(IO)(F)
                   NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM:(I)(F)
                   NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM:(I)(OI)(CI)(IO)(F)
                   BUILTIN\Users:(I)(OI)(CI)(RX)
                   NT AUTHORITY\Authenticated Users:(I)(M)
                   NT AUTHORITY\Authenticated Users:(I)(OI)(CI)(IO)(M)

Elaborazione completata per 1 file. Elaborazione non riuscita per 0 fi
+le

is fun also to see different languages for errors issued (italian coming from the OS and english).

L*

[RonW]

I suspect that this is related to internal commands infact when you say individual program i suspect that internal commands do not like slashes, while all other ones accept both slashes and backslashes.

Actually, some MSWindows-centric programs also don't accept / in file paths. For example, last time I used Beyond Compare's CLI, it choked on / even when it was a path like "c:/path/to/file.ext".

BTW, in MS-DOS, there was system call to change the "option switch" character. I don't remember what it was, but back when I had to use Win95, one of my mentors told me about it. Made the Win95 experience tolerable for me. Later, I discovered Cygwin.

[afoken]

in MS-DOS, there was system call to change the "option switch" character. I don't remember what it was

API: int 0x21, ax=0x3700 = Get Switch Character, int 0x21, ax=0x3701 = Set Switch Character. Both available since MS-DOS 2.0, ignored since MS-DOS 4.01, changed to always return "/" since MS-DOS 5, DR-DOS 3.41 to 6.0.

Anchient DOS versions (MS DOS 2.x and some OEM versions) allowed setting the switch character in config.sys by setting SWITCHAR=x.

So yes, you could change the switch character (before MS-DOS 5), but most programs ignored it, and for those few which followed it, you had to rewrite batch files to use your switch character instead of the standard "/". Update to MS-DOS 5.0 would require another rewrite back to "/".

Alexander