On Aug 15, 2007, at 4:25, A. Pagaltzis wrote:
By "doing it themselves" you force everyone to parse the command line on their own, which means quoting conventions and how to deal with spaces in filenames can vary not per shell, but per invoked program. If that's not hateful, I don't know what is.
It's also a security problem, because programs that call other programs don't know how to quote and escape the command line. In UNIX it is possible to write a program that can accept any command line safely, and to call it safely, without having any unexplained filename expansion, metacharacter interpretation, and so on happening. If you try and do that in DOS-derived systems you lose the ability to EVER get filename expansion from those programs.
Thankfully most programs today use the same MSFT C RTL so the conventions don't vary as much as they could, but it was a right pain in the bottocks during the DOS era and continued until WinXP managed to excise the last large pockets of Win9x installs.
Not enough do. Microsoft said so themselves, recently, during the recent "you're insecure too" row between IE and Firefox.
