Re: Issue using quoted arguments on os.execute() on Windows

[Jerome Vuarand <jerome.vuarand@...>]

2013/11/17 Peter Cawley <lua@corsix.org>:
> The end effect of these rules is that if you want the sensible
> behaviour of quotes being preserved, and you want this consistently,
> then your command line mustn't start with a quote character. To that
> end, my personal approach is to do `os.execute("type NUL && "..cmd)`
> rather than `os.execute(cmd)`.

What I'm doing to circumvent the problem is simply to add outer quotes
if the command contains quotes. This doesn't require type, doesn't
require NUL, doesn't create an extra process for every command run.
Simply:

if os.getenv('OS')=='Windows_NT' then
    local execute = os.execute
    function os.execute(command)
       if command:match('"') then
           command = '"'..command..'"'
       end
       return execute(command)
    end
end

and of course you can write smarter wrappers, for example:

function execute(...)
    local t = {}
    for i=1,select('#', ...) do
        local s = tostring(t[i])
        if s:match('"') then s = '"'..s..'"' end
        t[i] = s
    end
    local command = table.concat(t, ' ')
    if command:match('"') then command = '"'..command..'"' end
    return os.execute(command)
end

execute(table.unpack{
    'copy',
    root .. 'app.exe',
    [[C:\Program Files\App]],
})

That's already short, but I'm sure you can add many more features with
one line of code each.