Re: DOS path

[John Poltorak]

On Thu, Feb 14, 2002 at 08:53:58AM +0100, Tim Van Holder wrote:
> 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.  

':' can't be used as a path seperator because it is used to designate 
drive letters.


> > My understanding is that the better DOS
> > development environments support that.  (Use one of those.  :-)

Are any of these 'better DOS development environments' available for OS/2?

 
> 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.

I have just discovered that KSH interprets '\b' as a backspace, so when 
attempting to convert c:\usr\bin, the result comes out as c:/usin. I'm 
trying to work out the best way of dealing with this.

> 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).

I didn't think autoconf itself used config.site...


-- 
John