On Tue, 23 Sep 2003, James Frye wrote:
> On Tue, 23 Sep 2003, John Levon wrote:
>
> > This is not how things work. "PROGRA~1" is most definitely NOT the
> > "real filename".
>
> Well, that gets us into philosophical discussions about the nature of
> reality :-) What I know ('cause I just tried it) is that if I open a
> basic command-line prompt window on Win 2K, and do a "dir \progra~1", I
> get expected output from the dir command. If instead I do "dir \Program
> Files", I get a bunch of "File Not Found" messages. To me that says that
> the "progra~1" version of the filename is at a more basic level in the OS.
This behaviour is actually identical to *nix shells, you have to quote the
argument... for instance by doing:
dir "\program files"
The reason that you get two "File Not Found" is because you're trying to
list '\program' and '.\files'...
>
> In any case, the 8.3 version works, and so Lyx (or other programs) can
> easily be ported just by substituting '\' for '/', and telling the Windows
> user which version of the names to use. Constructive laziness :-)
To see the 8.3-names, just do:
dir /x
for more help on dir, do:
dir /?
>
> As for whether there's a "no spaces in filenames" rule in *nix, it's like
> the rule about driving on a particular side of the road.
I've never heard of such a rule, and quite often use spaces (and ���) in
my names...
> It's true that
> you can, with some effort, create names that have spaces (or other
> non-printing characters), just as you can ignore the signs and drive up
> the exit ramp onto the freeway. Either action is probably going to make
> for an interesting day, though.
It isn't *that* difficult really, more like tedious having to remember
the quoting. (In tcsh the :q and :x modifiers are useful to quote the
content of a variable for instance.)
/Christian
--
Christian Ridderstr�m http://www.md.kth.se/~chr
