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A comment on Ask HN: What overlooked class of tools should a self-taught programmer look into. Parent comment

Re:Ask HN: What overlooked class of tools should a self-taug... by pinum on Monday May 13, 2019 @10:19PM (#19906239)
>Most popular folder on Windows is "My documents"

Not really... not since XP, anyway. Unless you have a space in your username (which is a terrible idea for many other reasons), your "Documents" path is C:\Users\JohnSmith\Documents. "Program Files" is pretty much the only important path which is likely to have spaces, and your makefiles (hopefully!) don't need to touch that.

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Re:Ask HN: What overlooked class of tools should a self-taug... by Const-me on Monday May 13, 2019 @10:43PM (#19906348)
On Windows, it's not up to me to decide where users will keep my stuff, and where it will work. Users decide.

For a software to work fine on Windows, it must support spaces in files and paths. Also Unicode in files and paths.

VBScript does, GNU Make doesn't.

> which is a terrible idea for many other reasons

If you use make to setup stuff, it's very possible you'll need to access "c:\Users\All Users" which does contain space in username. Also "c:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files" which contain more than one.

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Re:Ask HN: What overlooked class of tools should a self-taug... by WhiteOwlLion on Tuesday May 14, 2019 @01:22AM (#19906968)
You can try the 8.3 convention,

DOCUME~1 Documents

or

<SYMLINKD> ALLUSE~1 All Users [C:\ProgramData]

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