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From: nather@utastro.UUCP (Ed Nather)
Newsgroups: net.micro.pc
Subject: Re: conventions regarding quoted arguments to DOS commands
Message-ID: <192@utastro.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 4-Jun-85 17:23:15 EDT
Article-I.D.: utastro.192
Posted: Tue Jun  4 17:23:15 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 6-Jun-85 06:44:24 EDT
References: <715@pyuxqq.UUCP>
Organization: U. Texas, Astronomy, Austin, TX
Lines: 29

> DOS seems to behave very differently from the UNIX shell
> when it comes to parsing command line arguments. 

True.  It separates at white space only (spaces or tabs).

> How, then, does one pass an argument containing delimiters such
> as blanks to a DOS command (especially a UNIX command ported to a PC)?

A few brave people have added quoted strings and filename expansion to
the setup program _main generated by various compilers, but I know of no
uniform solution.  MS-DOS needs a better shell.  If anyone has hacked
command.com to include these things, I hope they will post it to the
net.

> Does this mean that DOS programs
> use those SYSINT system calls themselves to get first matching file name
> and next matching file name whenever an argument contains wild card
> characters?
> Ron Levenberg, Bell Communications Research

Sadly, yes.

Of course, DOS only cost $60 list, and Unix cost us $600 ...  :-)

-- 
Ed Nather
Astronony Dept, U of Texas @ Austin
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