Oddities of exec

[skiflyer]

So if I type the following into a command window in XP

"C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003\Common7\IDE\devenv" "Some Directory With Spaces\\somefile.vcproj"

It compiles fine.

If I run the following PHP code

$compiler = '"C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003\Common7\IDE\devenv"';

exec($compiler.' directorywithoutspaces\\somefile.vcproj,$output,$error_code);

It runs fine... but if I run

$compiler = '"C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003\Common7\IDE\devenv"';
$arg = '"directory with spaces\\somefile.vcproj"';

exec($compiler.' '.$arg);

It spits back

'C:\Program' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file.

Error code is obviouslly 1 for that.

Anyone know what could be causing this?

 

[sleipnir214]

Have you tried swapping your backslashes with forwardslashes? I infer that you're running PHP on Win32 and know that Win32 uses backslashes for directory separators, but PHP gets weird with backslashes sometimes.


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[jpadie]

a vague answer - i'm afraid: i remember seeing something about this in the last couple of weeks. the advice from the poster in question was to you the old dos 8.3 filename structure.

 

[skiflyer]

Well my workaround is to use the quotes on the path to the compiler (since that's a registry value and I can't use the 8.3), and the 8.3 on the second argument, which sucks, because it's not 100% predictable in this case.

And yeah, I tried all the forward/backslashes... escape characters, etc. It just seems to be something about having double quotes around two different arguments that throws exec for a loop.

I'm running a slightly old version (4.3.8) so perhaps I'll upgrade and file a bug report if I can't figure it out.