[Ohrrpgce] Windows Shell substitute

[Ralph Versteegen]

On 26 October 2010 06:18, Mike <caron.mike at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm not at home at the moment, so I can't review the existing code. However, I should point out that command line parsing is the responsibility of the app. In practice, this is handled by the C/++ runtime being linked against.
>
> I can't speak for mingw's library, but in my experience, VC++ parses command lines like such:
>
> 1. Command line arguments are separated by spaces
> 2. If an argument contains a space, it must be surrounded by quotes (you can't escape the space)
> 3. Since quotes are illegal in paths, there's no reason not to quote all paths unconditionally.
>
> Cmd.exe, the command line processor, uses the caret (^) as an escape character (NOT backslash), but I do not think the VC++ runtime recognizes it.

Really? Interesting.

> My reccomendation (and, what I will do when I get home later) is to write a program that just lists its arguments and exits. If that shows as correct, but the other utilities still have problems, then its a bug in their end (unlikely as it is).

No need, I figured out the problem 9 months ago, and told everyone
here on the mailinglist. How could you forget! SHELL calls system()
which calls cmd.exe, and cmd.exe has some bizarre rules for
interpreting quotes in its command line which date back to some
ancient version of MS-DOS.

> Anyway, digression asside, the win32 equivalent to SHELL is... Shell. Or, preferredly, ShellEx. I can't imagine why SHELL wouldn't be a wrapper around it.
>
> If we opt to use it directly, it shouldn't be that big a change.
> --
> Mike Caron

Oh, hey. Good idea. I can't actually find this Shell function in the
WinAPI at the moment though, just in Visual Basic. The VB version
sounds like exactly what we need: a function that does not wait for
the program to finish, and preferably allows us to kill it if the user
cancels.


....
Argh, I just found another bug in MP3 import: I can't replace one
imported MP3 file with another without first importing a different
file format, including OGG, overtop first.