On: Kinda like apt-get, but for Windows

[SideburnsOfDoom]

Yep. That's old-school though, you don't see much of it these days.

[pjmlp → SideburnsOfDoom]

I never understood what is so hard in treating the space as just another character.

[j-kidd → pjmlp]

Because space is not just another character. Space separates args.

[ygra → j-kidd]

But an installer talking to the operating system shouldn't need to separate arguments anywhere.

[laumars → j-kidd]

Which is why escape characters and quotations were invented

[jfb → j-kidd]

It is an abject failing of software that perfectly reasonable characters are barred from filenames.

[pjmlp → j-kidd]

which is why most arguments tend to have a way to be recognized like -, -- or /

[lotyrin → pjmlp]

Those are how one differentiates flags from arguments, which is a separate problem.

[pjmlp → lotyrin]

Kind of.

If your flag is for a path, you can assume everything up to the next flag is a path name.

myprog -filename here is my path with spaces -another_flag

Of course this depends on how the shell gives the arguments to the program.

On the other hand, there is no excuse why some GUI programs cannot handle spaces.

[lotyrin → pjmlp]

cp path1 path2

So, that's just one file?

[SideburnsOfDoom → pjmlp]

Treating the space as just another character in a path means that sometimes paths have to be placed inside quotes so the space isn't taken for the end of a commandline arg. Some old software didn't do that.

[Nilzor → SideburnsOfDoom]

Chocolatey is not old software

[SideburnsOfDoom → Nilzor]

No, it does not have that excuse.

[darkchasma → SideburnsOfDoom]

But the packages it installs may.

[negativity → pjmlp]

The tilde file names in windows harken back to ye olde days of MSDOS, where file names were only allowed to be 8 characters long, and the extension was only allowed to be a dot followed by three characters (aka: the "eight-dot-three" file naming convention).

Like, if someone generated several thousand files, all named: "New Text Document.txt"

In the background, some versions of Windows will also record an alternate file name for ye olde backwards compatibility, such as:

NEWTEX~1.TXT

NEWTE~10.TXT

NEWT~100.TXT

NEW~1000.TXT

NE~10000.TXT

N~100000.TXT

It's not really about the space characters, so much as it is about length constraints from back when 640KB should've been more memory than anyone will ever need.