From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: "Eli Zaretskii" <eliz@is.elta.co.il>
To: cgf@redhat.com
Cc: gdb-patches@sources.redhat.com
Subject: Re: RFC: Inferior command line arguments
Date: Mon, 01 Oct 2001 00:39:00 -0000
Message-id: <1659-Mon01Oct2001094011+0300-eliz@is.elta.co.il>
References: <87zo7gq7gb.fsf@creche.redhat.com> <2593-Fri28Sep2001103201+0300-eliz@is.elta.co.il> <87u1xnh4ns.fsf@creche.redhat.com> <4331-Fri28Sep2001162207+0300-eliz@is.elta.co.il> <8766a3gy0m.fsf@creche.redhat.com> <1858-Fri28Sep2001182535+0300-eliz@is.elta.co.il> <20010930150751.A32444@redhat.com>
X-SW-Source: 2001-10/msg00000.html

> Date: Sun, 30 Sep 2001 15:07:51 -0400
> From: Christopher Faylor <cgf@redhat.com>
> >
> >And running Cygwin applications needs yet another modification.  For
> >the full story, see the function sys_spawnve on w32proc.c in the Emacs
> >distribution.
> 
> I am not sure why cygwin would need more modifications.  We try to emulate
> the standard arcane Windows quoting rules.
> 
> Could you elaborate?

Well, I'm talking from hearsay here, so please take the below with a
grain of salt.

According to the comments and the code in src/w32proc.c in the Emacs
distribution, command lines passed to Cygwin applications need the
following special treatment:

  - quote some more special characters, like \r, \n, and \f (MSVC
    programs don't allow these in commands, I believe);

  - `\' needs to be escaped;

  - to escape a `"', you need to double it, whereas MSVC applications
    use a backslash to escape a quote.

It's possible that all this is true for some old version of Cygwin,
while current Cygwin versions are 100% compatible.