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From: Marin David Condic <mcondic@mindspring.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Gnat 3.13p: Command_Name RM A.15
Date: Tue, 16 Jan 2001 09:22:51 -0500
Organization: MindSpring Enterprises
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The problem you are having is due to the fact that command line behavior is
operating system dependent. The compiler has to ask the OS to give it the contents
of the command line because it can't get it for itself. (The command line is
determined before your compiled code is even up and running.)

So you're stuck with the problem that various flavors of Unix are going to parse
things on the command line before handing it to your program. WinXX is going to do
similar things, only differently from Unix. VMS behaves in its own way. None of
these OS's have ever agreed on how a command line should be treated, so there is no
portable way of dealing with it.

Note that this isn't something that the language can specify. It would be the same
problem in C/C++ or any other language.

You might try writing something that attempts to detect the type of system it is
running on and then parse the command line accordingly. Unfortunately, I know of no
*standard* way of doing that.

MDC

Christoph Grein wrote:

> On win98 with Gnat3.13p, Ada.Command_Line.Command_Name always returns the full
> path, irrespective of the actual command line (executable only, relative or
> absolute path), whereas on winNT, only the string as entered on the command line
> is returned.
>
> This different behaviour is annoying when trying to write portable code and you
> need the full path (including drive).

--
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Marin David Condic - Quadrus Corporation - http://www.quadruscorp.com/
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