Comment by Joker_vD
4 years ago
One of the main reasons why Windows used "Program Files" and "Documents and Settings" was to force the programs (and programmers) to deal with paths with spaces. And you know, for the most part it kinda, more or less worked out although of course even today you will find programs that ask you to install them in a folder without spaces in the path.
And that was a good idea, if only Microsoft also fixed the CreateProcess function, Windows would be somewhat sane in this regard. But somehow nobody seemed to think of it. Seriously, look at it:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/processth...
The arguments are a single string. So you want to pass parameters with spaces in them? You've got to add quotes and stuff all of that into a single string. Instead of doing it in a more sane manner, like oh, the arguments to main().
The root cause is that argv isn't a first-class citizen like on linux, but an abstraction. The kernel only cares about a single string argument. If you use main instead of WinMain, the CRT will transform the single string into an argv for you.
Oh and cmd.exe uses a different escaping scheme than the CRT.
Microsoft is in full control of the Windows kernel, so they can make it care about whatever they want to, and one would think better argument passing would be a nice quality of life improvement. Less nonsense for developers to deal with, and less weird bugs on the platform.
2 replies →
maintaining backwards compatibility means maintaining silly decisions, and Microsoft does both.
The main culprit for space issues is stuff relying on BAT or CMD files, where escaping variables seems to be a black art.
Sadly such set includes loads of Java programs. If only SUN had shipped a standard way to generate isolated exe files in 1998... but they worked under the presumption that you'd have a JVM already there, because distributing that monster was difficult in dialup times, so you could just hand people a jar; and the enterprise market did not care, since they had webapp servers. Sadly it's an "optimization" that became obsolete very quickly but wasn't rectified until it was too late (java 9+).
> The main culprit for space issues is stuff relying on BAT or CMD files, where escaping variables seems to be a black art.
Actually it isn't, just use double quotes and add a '~'. It's just about the only thing batch files handle better than shell scripts. set "VARIABLE=%~PATH"
That annoys me every time I use a Windows system. It was a terrible decision, especially since both the command prompt and the new powershell doesn't accept like bash a backspace before a space, you have to quote the whole path! I get that most users on Windows don't use the shell, but as a developer I do a lot, and every time it's a pain (no wonder they added the WSL in Windows after the failure of Powershell...)
Why would they accept a backslash? Backslash is a path separator on Windows. In most Windows programs, you don't even need to escape the space - arguments can contain spaces and it will understand it, like `notepad My file.txt`
The escape character on PowerShell is backtick, and on cmd it is caret. You don't need to quote everything.
VFAT and stuff like that actually provided alternate names like PROGRA~1
Yes, I was doing code to quickly read FAT folders (on a micro controller) and got to the bit about filenames more than 8.3. I decided my life was too short (and processing time) to go and sort out what the "real" file name is. Enforced 8.3 as a requirement!
They may have thought that would happen but I saw just as much stuff end up in C:\Windows or \Users or (always my favorite) those “Documents” that are really just “whatever random crap every app wants to put there”.
Yet in Microsofts own cmd tool I need to put quotes around my path if I want to refer to any files/folders below those folders.