Re: [bug-gawk] Percent Signs in External Commands on Windows

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2012 20:49:22 -0700 (PDT)
> From: David Millis <address@hidden>
> Cc: address@hidden
> 
> > And what CMD does then is hopelessly wrong,
> > because it gives you no way of escape-protecting the
> > first and the last quote from being removed.
> Quite an easy way actually. This is what I've been saying all along about 
> concatenating fodder quotes.
> You protect your first and last quotes, buy _adding_ quotes whose sole 
> purpose are to get eaten by CMD's stupid but predictable heuristic.
> There's no inner-escaping to worry about, and the command string is otherwise 
> unscathed.

You are using toy examples.  It doesn't work in real life.  E.g.,
outer quotes are only removed if the whole command starts with a
quote, which is not always what you want (think about protecting a
wildcard).

Sorry, I don't have time to present examples which break, all I can
say is that I was at this impasse more than once.  It's unworkable.