Olin Lathrop wrote:

> Dr Skip wrote:
>> Quoting just the variable, as in "%1" in the bat file passes
>> the quotes to tar, and no quotes fails on dirs with spaces such as
>> Program Files. Blasted Microsoft!!
> 
> This is not the shell's fault, but rather the fault of the program that
> can't handle command line arguments quoted.  The shell passes quotes
> from the command line to the target program just like it should.  A
> shell that thinks it's clever about what you meant on the command line
> would only cause a lot more trouble in other areas.  I'd rather have a
> dumb shell than one that's too clever by a half.

Exactly. FWIW, I wouldn't call that "too clever", not even by a half :)
Quoted command line argument are simply standard in Windows. Any CLI
program meant to run on Windows should understand these, and strip the
(double) quotes appropriately. 

That's what I meant with "partly ported": such a program seems to be
"ported" so that it runs on Windows, but using *ix CLI conventions. That
may be useful when you have a shell that also uses *ix CLI conventions, but
it doesn't do what it should in a Windows shell. So the solution for using
these programs without too many surprises is probably using a (also partly
ported :) *ix shell on Windows, like bash.

Skip, you said you installed cygwin. That's a biggie, and it seems to come
with its own set of integration problems. A smaller solution is MinGW
(MSYS); it seems to work well in the sense that it has most of the common
*ix CLI tools, but with less integration hassles.

Gerhard

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