So, I've discovered[1] something new about Windows. Basically, there's no such thing as `argv' in win32-land, and each program has to parse its command-line manually (I had known that they had to do wild-card expansion manually, but not parse the entire damned string). This isn't so much the problem as there is no sane Win32 API for starting a process with a sequence of arguments. The reason this is a problem is that Twisted's Process API uses sequences of arguments. In light of this, I have a few somewhat-orthogonal proposals to make, but I think they should all be done (well, except, perhaps, the last): * Add a method to the Win32 Process Interface (IWin32Process?) that accepts a string rather than an executable and a list of args. We should allow people to use the (unfortunately) sanest method available for starting processes on Windows. * Add a warning to win32eventreactor.Process.__init__ (in the case that the user passed in a sequence of args) that tells people about this problem. * Add some auto-quoting evilness[2] to win32eventreactor.Process.__init__, for when arguments are passed as a sequence. What we have there absolutely sucks (" ".join), and we should probably at least try to make the existing API as reliable as possible. * Perhaps make the string "command-line" API available on PosixProcess as well, so people can use either the string or the sequence API and expect at least some bit of cross-platformness (but I'm fine with telling people to just use the sequence API if others don't like this, especially considering this either requires calling out to a shell (gah), or doing some unfun argument-splitting.) *whimper* :-( References: [1] http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-win32/2003-April/000906.html [2] <exarkun> ' '.join(['"%s"' % (s.replace('\\', '\\\\').replace('"', '\\"')) for s in args[1:]]) -- Twisted | Christopher Armstrong: International Man of Twistery Radix | Release Manager, Twisted Project ---------+ http://twistedmatrix.com/users/radix.twistd/