Re: [RFC] Do not treat '\' as escape character on MinGW Windows hosts

Christopher Faylor
2010-04-21T22:08:39Z

On Wed, Apr 21, 2010 at 04:33:54PM -0400, Joel Brobecker wrote:
>Hello,
>
>With the MinGW debugger, it is currently not possible to use a path
>that follows the Windows convention. For instance:
>
> (gdb) file c:\foo\bar.exe
> c:foobar.exe: No such file or directory.
>
>This is because the routine that parses arguments treats all backslashes
>as an escape character. With a MinGW tool, this does not make sense
>when the argument is a path, since the canonical directory separator
>on Windows is a backslash...
>
>What the user has to do, at this point, is escape every backslash,
>which can be quite painful when the path starts getting longer...
>
> (gdb) file c:\\foo\\bar.exe
> Reading symbols from c:\foo\bar.exe...done.

Why not just use a "forward" slash?

cgf