OpenEuphoria

Re: long filenames under ex.exx

• Posted by Mike Nelson <MichaelANelson at WORLDNET.ATT.NET> Feb 23, 2002
• 433 views

Al Gonzalez wrote:


To: "EUforum" <EUforum at topica.com>
Subject: long filenames under ex.exx


>
> Hi all,
>
> I am writing a small command line utility that will take a folder alias,
> look up the path to that folder and either cd to that folder or launch
> explorer at that folder.
>
> The explorer part works fine the cd part is giving me an error with long
> filenames. I am running it using ex.exe instead of exw.exe so that the
> work will happen in my current dos session.
>
>    system("cd c:\\program files", 2) results in
>    Too many parameters - files
>
>    system("cd \"c:\\program files\"", 2) results in
>    Parameter format not correct -  "c:\program
>
> Any suggestion would be appreciated.
>
Al,

The problem is that cd is a DOS command and DOS uses the space to separate
command line parameters, so the cd C:\Program Files is interperted by DOS as
"change directory to C:\Program, what the hell is that Files parameter for?"

The Solution is to get DOS to see "C:\Program Files" as DOS does not
interpret a space in a quoted string as a parameter separator and will
interpret as "Change directory to C:\Program Files, no problem."

The correct Euphoria code is

system("cd \"c:\\program files\"", 2)  -- the \"  includes a literal " in
the string

By the way, it does no harm to enclose a file or folder name in quotes if it
has no spaces, so this solution will also work for variable file/folder
names.

-- MIke Nelson