Hello mathew,

m> Eric Hodel wrote:

>> Agreed, I don't think this is ruby's fault


m> Right. The problem is that Windows' use of '\' as both path separator
m> and string escape character, leads to unexpected behavior.

m> I think it's a bit beyond Ruby's scope to try to fix that...

No it's not.

It definetely ruby's fault. Windows doesn't have an escape
character for the command line. So we can't use it here.

The failure is somewhere in win32.c in the function

rb_w32_cmdvector(const char *cmd, char ***vec)

that parses the command line.
I would really suggest to use the routine from the Operating system
for this and not our own interpretation. As this part still belongs to
the Operating System and not to ruby, we should not try to unify it.

So at least on WinXP,Win2K we should use the CommandLineToArgvW function
and in all other Windows systems we should duplicate the MSVC parsing
routine.



-- 
 Best regards,                        emailto: scholz at scriptolutions dot com
 Lothar Scholz                        http://www.ruby-ide.com
 CTO Scriptolutions                   Ruby, PHP, Python IDE 's