OT: How does Windows handle spaces in program names?

[Graham Samuel]

Again thanks to all who replied. I'm trying to do the things that Mike and Ken have suggested, but meanwhile for Björnke, I am not sure what escape involves in Windows - I assume there is an escape character or character pair... and as to quoting in file names, where Mike had

"firefox.exe" 

(including the quotes)

I tried "My spacious program.exe" since I couldn't see how to introduce a further level of quotes.

As I said, I don't know much about Windows.

Am trying other suggestions and will report back.

Graham

On Sun, 22 May 2011 19:55:05 +0200 Bj?rnke von Gierke <bvg at mac.com> wrote:

> you need to quote or escape spaces. That was suggested and people succesfully tested it on their own setup.
> 
> What exactly did you try to quote the filenames, or escape the spaces?
> 
> On 22 May 2011, at 19:51, Graham Samuel wrote:
> 
>> Excuse me for repeating myself, but I put the essentials of this message to the list already under another subject heading - this one reflects what I'm really trying to find out.
>> 
>> Mike Bonner has been helping me on this list with a little VB script that launches a Windows program from within a LiveCode standalone cleverly enough to avoid multiple instances. As an example, he wrote a script that launches Firefox. One of the lines looked like this:
>> 
>> WshShell.Run "firefox.exe"
>> 
>> I was able to make this work, and to show that it works with **any** program on the PC that doesn't have a space in its name - you just have to replace 'firefox' with the new program name. But it doesn't work if the name contains a space, and I have to invoke just such a program. This prog already has thousands of users, so I can't change the name to avoid the problem.
>> 
>> The question is, what is happening when the launch fails, apart from a VB error (to the effect that it can't find the file, but it doesn't tell me the name of the file it can't find, which may be a clue). I just don't know how to track down the error or how to avoid it - maybe I have to substitute something for the space character, or maybe there is a shadow name that I can't see... I am hoping a Windows / VB savvy person can help me.
>> 
>> It would be helpful of course if I could see the process list in the PC - then I could launch the prog from outside my LC app and just look at the list to see what Windows calls it, but I don't know how to do that on XP since 'tasklist' isn't recognised and I don't know how to display things from a VB script. It's sad to be so ignorant, but the charm of LiveCode is that you don't normally have to know this kind of stuff about your target OS.
>> 
>> Any help greatly appreciated.

>