RE: [Axiom-developer] Windows space in directory/file names

[Bill Page]

Tim,

Thanks for pointing out short path names on Windows. Yes,
I think this is very useful for supporting old lagacy
Windows/DOS applications that have not been updated to
support long file names (are there still out there?) No,
short paths can not include any spaces.

I think such a manipulation of the names might be appropriate
to include in the Windows version of the lisp TRUENAME
function (or a variant thereof) in order to supported older
programs. But in new coding, I think it will not be a problem
to support full long file names including spaces. It is just
a matter of finding and fixing the "gotcha's".

Regards,
Bill Page.

On Thursday, January 13, 2005 10:41 AM you wrote:
> 
> The windows sdk function GetShortPathName() will give you
> the standard 8.3 path that corresponds to a long path.
> I don't know if the 'short path' is explicitly not allowed
> to contain spaces, but it usually won't.  In my MinGW
> environment, I use a little utility I wrote for
> shortening paths based on this function.  If you say 
> 
>     shortpath c:/program files/
> 
> it says
> 
>     c:/PROGA~1/
> 
> Those paths can be used interchangeably, so you can just
> have programs that don't understand spaces in paths use
> the latter.  I've attached the utility.  gcc shouldn't
> need any special flags to compile it in MinGW.  Maybe you
> guys can cannibalize it for axiom.
> 
>