Re: Spaces in path names

[Howard Chu]

Bob Friesenhahn wrote:
> On Thu, 12 Jan 2006, Roger While wrote:
>
> > Hi Ralf,
> > Well, how ARE you supposed to get around this ?
> > Here's an excerpt :
> > HOME is /cygdrive/c/Dokumente und Einstellungen/Roger While
> > build directory is $HOME/open-cobol-0.33
>
> Due to the many layers of shell scripting in libtool, supporting spaces 
> in filenames is complicated and must be proven for every case. It is a 
> huge job.
>
> Since you are using Cygwin, you should be able to use Cygwin's 'mount' 
> facility to map the problem path so that it appears as a path without 
> spaces in the name.  Of course, this approach is not as user friendly as 
> it could be and requires extra effort on the part of the person who 
> builds the package.

On my Windows systems I edit all profiles so user home directories all 
reside under D:\home - problem solved. I also regedit all paths with "My 
<xxx>" and delete the "My " part. (Talk about useless cruft.) And yes, 
since I primarily use Unix, all the Windows account names are up-to-8 
characters long, with no embedded spaces.

I suppose it takes a bit of effort to get it working once, but then it's 
done. Anyone who's coming to Cygwin from a real Unix environment is 
probably going to want to work that way anyway.

Sure, it would be A Good Thing to make libtool work correctly with 
spaces in filenames. But chasing that is a distraction from getting my 
real work done, and my real work doesn't uses spaces in filenames. 
(Philosophically, spaces/"user-friendly" filenames only make sense in 
the world of computer-illiterate GUI users. Command-line users want 
tokens that are small and fast to type, and Cygwin is a command-line 
environment after all.)
--
  -- Howard Chu
  Chief Architect, Symas Corp.  http://www.symas.com
  Director, Highland Sun        http://highlandsun.com/hyc
  OpenLDAP Core Team            http://www.openldap.org/project/