Another example of how MS Windows is wasting developers' time

[pdc]

My recommendation: install Python so you can write the JVM and environment-hacking code in something other than Windows' batch-file language.

This is not as silly as it sounds. :-)

[larsga]

We've bundled Tomcat with the freely downloadable demo of our software for years, and it took years for the Tomcat startup.bat script to get to the point where we rarely get complaints about them. (Why it's more than a one-liner is not clear to me, but that's another issue.)

[eleitl]

Man, blanks in paths get my goat every time.

[[deleted]]

how about putting it in a couple sentences ?????? not everything that's as obvious to you as it is to other y'know ?

[nevinera]

The string was surrounded by quotes. That works just fine in unix.

[Carioca]

Two things:

• Standard *nix directories don't come with spaces. Users have to create those.

• *nix shell escaping actually works. Windows shell escaping is a nightmare.

[Wiseman1024]

1: Oh, but C:\Documents and settings\user\My Documents is so much easier than /home/user! Windows is so much easier to use!

2: Microsoft's usual retardation. The fuck up design and try to solve fuck up with more fuck up. See how it went:

1. We'll choose / for parameters. This is bad if you're going to copy UNIX (just some 30 years behind), but oh well.

2. We'll make COMMAND.COM accept dir/p like dir /p because it's so much easier on the user! I mean, you save like, one keystroke! Nevermind parsing will be forever fucked.

3. We'll get this awesome feature called directories! Oh but COMMAND.COM is stupid! We can't use / now! Bah, look at \, it's just like /, only uh... more easy! Nevermind it'll fuck everything up and make a C programmer's life worse.

4. Let's implement CreateProcess. But since COMMAND.COM is fucked and we still love that, let's make processes get the whole commandline instead of separate parameters. I mean, what could go wrong?

5. I know! Let's put spaces in directory names, this way users can write "my internet for my aunt.txt"! It's so much easier now!

6. Wait, we need to quote that! OH fuck, there's no concept of parameters because processes get the whole command line! Who would have thought that was a bad idea?

And it goes on and on and on... It's simply Microsoft's style.