On Monday 22 September 2003 13:40, Paul A. Rubin wrote: > Sounds right for *nix, but spaces in paths are a way of life in the > Windoze world (not sure about Macs, but I think they're legal there, > too).
Any software which allows commands with arguments has to have some way of separating commands and arguments from each other. By analogy with English (and many other languages) almost all software systems which are text-based use spaces as separators. Unix and similar systems use spaces as separators, but often can accept file and directory names with spaces by enclosing them in double quotes. Unfortunately, many programs running under these systems use scripts which do not enclose file names in quotes, so they break when they encounter such names. LaTeX is obviously such a program. As far as I know, Windows is the only significant operating system which allows spaces in file and directory names. This is in keeping with its design as a totally graphical operating system, where a command line should never be needed. Les
