Sorry about the formatting in the last message

Greetings,

I can't seem to send a command to the shell that contains ". Silly attempts
that demonstrate the problem:

irb(main):002:0> %x{cmd /c "cd && dir *.txt"}
Syntax error: Unterminated quoted string
""
irb(main):003:0> %x{cmd /c \"cd && dir *.txt\"}
Syntax error: Unterminated quoted string
""

vital statistics:
Windows NT 4.0 SP6

D:\Code>ruby --version
ruby 1.6.1 (2000-10-05) [i386-cygwin]

What obvious thing am I overlooking?
Thanks,

Joe Swatosh