RFC: alias and unalias command

[Paul Moore]

On 05/02/2008, James Henstridge <james at jamesh.id.au> wrote:
> All you have shown is that two commands treat equals signs as spaces.
> Alexander's test is more useful because it shows that the character is
> preserved by the command line argument parser.

The key point here is that the Windows API presents the command line,
completely unevaluated. Commands can do anything they like with it.
The argument parser you are seeing with Python is the C runtime, which
does not treat "=" specially.

Having said that, I believe certain versions of the command shell
CMD.EXE treats "=" *in arguments to .bat files* as a space. So if you
put a .bat file wrapper round a Python (or other) program, you may
have problems. Having said that, I personally dislike bat file
wrappers for other reasons, but that's a different story.

Paul.