Re: DOS path

[Tim Van Holder]

On Thu, 2002-02-14 at 00:46, Paul Eggert wrote:
> > From: John Poltorak <address@hidden>
> > Date: Wed, 13 Feb 2002 20:21:20 +0000
> > 
> > What is the recommended way of treating a DOS path such as? :-
> > 
> > c:\def\ghij;k:\lm;
> > 
> > 
> > Should some attempt be made to convert '\' to '/' before running autoconf 
> > or configure,
> 
> That's what I'd do, yes.
> 
> In fact, I'd go further and insist on a PATH that conforms to POSIX,
> and uses ":" as a separator.  My understanding is that the better DOS
> development environments support that.  (Use one of those.  :-)

I wouldn't go that far; autoconf currently supports ';' as pathsep
just fine.  And in "most" places, I think it also handles a \ as dirsep.

However, there will probably be places where a path is (accidentally)
echoed or passed unquoted (e.g. subdir configuration is one of those,
IIRC), causing the backslashes to be expanded as escaped characters.
So while it _shouldn't_ be a problem (and any such problems should still
be posted here; if we can trivially support this, I believe we should),
I would indeed recommend flipping PATH slashes for autoconf (e.g. in
config.site).

Even better would be to use a smart shell (such as the bash that comes
with DJGPP or Cygwin) that flips them for you (and unflips them when
calling external programs, so existing DOS apps that use PATH don't
break when called from configure).