[Distutils] distutils - Filenames/Pathnames with spaces under WinNT

[Greg Ward]

On 09 March 2000, Jonathan M. Gilligan said:
> I'm new on this list, so please forgive me if I'm treading on familiar 
> ground, but I didn't see this issue raised when I browsed through the last 
> month or so of archives.
> 
> Distutils for Windows NT,9x,2K seems to have a big hole in the way it forms 
> command-lines for the compiler and friends: it doesn't account for the fact 
> that filenames and pathnames may have spaces in them and thus may need to 
> be quoted on the command-line passed to external tools (compiler, linker). 

Yeah, that did come up not *too* long ago.  It was during a big flurry
of activity on the Windows support, so no surprise that you missed it.

Bottom line: Thomas Heller submitted a patch several weeks ago, and I
*finally* got around to applying it this weekend.  It's in the CVS
version.

> I started hacking at the msvccompiler.py source to put quotes around 
> filenames passed as arguments, but then realized that it would probably be 
> better to implement a "wrapfilename(fname)" method in the ccompiler class 
> and then subclass it appropriately for *ix (return fname) and WinNT (return 
> '"%s"' % fname). Then every time a filename or path gets added to a 
> command-line it must be processed with wrapfilename(). For instance:
> 
>     inputOpt = fileOpt + wrapfilename(srcFile)
> 
> Does this sound like a reasonable approach? Am I missing a boat somewhere?

But what about arguments with spaces in them that *aren't* filenames?
(And what about spawning programs on Windows *other* than the
compiler/linker?  Granted that's not happening right now in Distutils,
but who knows what'll happen in the future?)

> Alternately, one could modify _spawn_nt to wrap each of its arguments in 
> double-quotes, but that seems potentially more problematic (Some programs 
> may not transparently discard quotation marks on command-line arguments. 
> Consider the behavior of the find command.).

That's exactly what we ended up doing.  Your point about some programs
not dealing with quote characters is a bit unsettling, though.  *sigh*

"Those who do not learn from Unix are doomed to reinvent it -- badly."

        Greg
-- 
Greg Ward - Unix weenie                                 gward@python.net
http://starship.python.net/~gward/
Earn cash in your spare time -- blackmail your friends!