2012/10/26 Renato Silva <br.renatosilva@gmail.com>
2012/10/26 Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>
> That seems an specific (and annoying) bug with cmd.exe


What bug are you alluding to?  I see no bug in the examples I posted"
"cd", the cmd.exe internal command, is not advertised as supporting
forward slashes in file names.  We are lucky it sometimes work.

It should either support or not support, it shouldn't work sometimes at arbitrary situations.
 
> since it seems to work only if you run cd from drive root.

What "seems to work only if you run cd from drive root"?  Can you show
an example of what works and what doesn't work?

Cd with forward slashes, it seems to work fine in Windows 7 but not in XP, example:

C:\Usuários> cd "C:/Programas/MinGW"

The system cannot find the path specified.
C:\Usuários> cd C:\
C:\> cd "C:/Programas/MinGW"
C:\Programas\MinGW>
 

> NTFS and Windows API, however, should handle them ok.

If you mean forward slashes, yes.  But the problem is, some commands
interpret their arguments before passing them to the APIs.  E.g., "cd"
supports options, like "/d", so it looks at its argument to see if
these switches are specified.

Then that's a problem specific to the program you're trying to use. I mean when writing programs and scripts themselves, for example you should be able to use forward slashes just fine in Python or Ruby scripts, or your MinGW programs, becasue they won't use the cd command or whatever, but the Windows API (indirectly through MSVCRT). Of course it doesn't eliminate the drive letter problem, but it should avoid lot of trouble already on relative paths and if you attach a prefix with different roots between Windows and unixes.

Old thread but just to avoid confusion, resending the above message wrongly sent to specific recipient instead of the list.