[MLton] Re: [MLton-commit] r6699

[Matthew Fluet]

On Mon, 15 Jun 2009, Florian Weimer wrote:
>> The  idea  is  that  you enter single quote mode at the start and exit at the
>> end, but inside, any single quote is replaced by
>>
>>     Single quote to exit single quote mode.
>>     \' to actually add a single quote, backslash protected.
>>     Single quote to re-enter single quote mode.
>>
>> I would be very surprised if the Cygwin shell didn't handle this correctly.
>
> It's not about the shell, it's about other Windows applications
> parsing the command line (I think).

It's about the Win32 spawn* functions (and possibly the CreateProcess 
function), which provide fork/exec-like functionality.

The issue (as I understand it) is that the  char **argv  argument passed 
to spawnv{,p}{,e} becomes the  const char **argv  argument passed to main 
of the created process.  One doesn't expect the contents of those character 
arrays to be changed from spawn{,p}{,e} to main (that is, one shouldn't 
need to do any escaping at all and one certainly doesn't need to for the 
*nix exec{,p}{,e} functions), but there is some evidence that MinGW 
does (or un-does?) escaping of the arguments.