oops, in light of the quadruple backslashes solution, maybe cygwin is fine. : ) I think this is actually in the pickaxe book, I just forgot about it. One thousand apologies. -lw On Wed, 02 Jan 2002 02:00:01 GMT, Le Wang <lewang@?(nospam)?.bigfoot.com> wrote: >Hi all, > >I just spent about 20 min trying to troubleshoot Benoit Cerrina's >problem with xcopy and windows (see: 'Execing commands with >backquotes' thread). It turned out that the cygwin release had >trouble interacting with native windows commands. > >Now my question is this: if the the installable executable is geared >towards newbies who are more accustomed to the windows way of doing >things, should it not include the mswin32 release instead of the >cygwin release? > >Perhaps some of the contents of the pickaxe book is predicated on the >cygwin release, so maybe it could be offered in parallel...(but that >would be confusing to a newbie too). > >Just my $0.02 > >-lw