@jterry75 FYI

Is there a document somewhere that explains how Windows treats quotes on the command line? I'd like to understand it once and for all.

Is there a document somewhere that explains how Windows treats quotes on the command line? I'd like to understand it once and for all.

Most Windows programs call CommandLineToArgvW WinAPI (or similar) to parse input parameters. Go does too. Go also has syscall.EscapeArg to do the opposite - convert []string into command line string. The syscall.EscapeArg doc also has some references.

Some Windows programs use different rules for encoding []string into command line. Most notably cmd.exe and msiexec.exe (see #15566 for details).

Alex

This is working as expected.

Go does not have its own command line into parameter list converter (not yet). It uses Windows CommandLineToArgvW for that job. And CommandLineToArgvW converts

`test.exe "c:\test\"`

into

 []string{`test.exe`, `c:\test"`}.

See https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms880421 for CommandLineToArgvW rules.

Luckily we also have new CL https://go-review.googlesource.com/#/c/22932 pending, that replaces call into Windows CommandLineToArgvW with a Go code. I just tried adding your command line to the test there https://go-review.googlesource.com/#/c/22932/2/src/os/exec_windows_test.go@32, and the test still pass. I also printed out from the test:

C:\Users\Alex>u:\test -test.v -test.run=Command
=== RUN   TestCommandLineToArgv
--- PASS: TestCommandLineToArgv (0.01s)
        exec_windows_test.go:44: out=["test"]
        exec_windows_test.go:44: out=["test" "a" "b" "c"]
        exec_windows_test.go:44: out=["test" ""]
        exec_windows_test.go:44: out=["test" ""]
        exec_windows_test.go:44: out=["test" "\""]
        exec_windows_test.go:44: out=["test" "" "a"]
        exec_windows_test.go:44: out=["test" "123"]
        exec_windows_test.go:44: out=["test" "\"123\""]
        exec_windows_test.go:44: out=["test" "\"123" "456\""]
        exec_windows_test.go:44: out=["test" "\\"]
        exec_windows_test.go:44: out=["test" "\\\""]
        exec_windows_test.go:44: out=["test" "\\\\\""]
        exec_windows_test.go:44: out=["test" "\\\"x"]
        exec_windows_test.go:44: out=["test" "\"\"\\\""]
        exec_windows_test.go:44: out=["cmd line" "abc"]
        exec_windows_test.go:44: out=["test" "\\\\\"x\"y z"]
        exec_windows_test.go:44: out=["test" "b" "x\ty"]
        exec_windows_test.go:44: out=["test.exe" "c:\\test\""]
PASS

C:\Users\Alex>

As you can see, the last line looks just like output of your program.

Alex