DOS or not? [was Re: How to tell Script to use pythonw.exe ?]

[Tim Chase]

On 2013-07-03 09:51, Tim Golden wrote:
> We can certainly agree on this. I can't count the number of emails
> I've deleted as too hot-headed in response to dismissive comments
> about Windows as a platform. Some of them, at least, appear to be
> from people who last actually used Windows back in the 9x days when
> the command window was very limited indeed.

I guess one of my biggest frustrations with the cmd.exe (and
command.com) interpreters is that argument processing is left to the
application, so each application may do it slightly differently:

  C:\temp\> find weather *.py
  FIND: Parameter format not correct
  C:\temp\> find "weather" *.py
  ---------- WFD.PY
  weather = Weather(lat, lon)
  C:\temp\> findstr weather *.py
  wfd.py: weather = Weather(lat, lon)
  C:\temp\> findstr "weather" *.py
  wfd.py: weather = Weather(lat, lon)

And more maddeningly:

  C:\temp\> start file.txt
  ... opens the file correctly in Notepad
  C:\temp\> start "file with space.txt"
  ... opens a new dos box with the name "file with space.txt" rather
      than opening the file
  C:\temp\> start "" "file with space.txt"
  ... opens the file correctly in Notepad

It's the little inconsistencies like this that wear daily on me.  That
and the lack of built-in utilities, so I'm regularly adding GNU tools
on new boxes.

-tkc