Re: [AUCTeX-devel] Fix about usage of kpsewhich

[David Kastrup]

David Kastrup <address@hidden> writes:

> Ikumi Keita <address@hidden> writes:
>
>> Hi Mosè and all,
>>
>>>>>>> Mosè Giordano <address@hidden> writes:
>>> sorry for the late reply, these days I'm getting all @gnu.org emails
>>> with huge delay.
>>
>> It seems that the delivery system of GNU mail list suffers severe
>> trouble these days.  No mails since Nov 30 are listed on
>> https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/auctex/
>> https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/auctex-devel/
>> https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-auctex/
>> at the time of writing this message.
>>
>>> 2017-12-01 23:34 GMT+01:00 David Kastrup <address@hidden>:
>>>>> Braces + comma should be fine.
>>>> 
>>>> Unless there are directories containing comma itself in the PATH.  Is
>>>> that an allowed character in Windows file systems?
>>
>>> It's allowed in NTFS, according to Wikipedia[1]:
>>
>>>     In Win32 namespace: any UTF-16 code unit (case-insensitive) except
>>>     /\:*"?<>| as well as NUL
>>
>> Actually, the code in question is used regardless of the platform, so
>> the file systems involved are not limited to NTFS.
>>
>> I just thought of another approach using brace expansion.  We can obtain
>> the right path delimiter by just taking the second character of the
>> output of "kpsewhich --expand-path {.,..}".
>
> Presumably
>
>     kpsewhich --expand-path "{.,..}"
>
> That's really clever.  Yes, it should do the trick, assuming the Windows
> executable doesn't try to be helpful by inserting the current directory,
> and "foreign" implementations of kpsewhich (like the MikTeX one) behave
> accordingly.

Ok, here is how I suggest to use that trick: if the expanded string
contains ; use ; as delimiter, otherwise :.  That should work even if
some executable considers it sane to insert drive letters or directory
separators or whatever else.  But a ; in there should never be
accidental.

-- 
David Kastrup