From help-request at octave dot org Thu Nov 18 12:01:06 2004
Subject: Re: Possible to increase 256 Mb Memory Limit? (Windows 2000)
From: Miroslaw Kwasniak <mirek at zind dot ikem dot pwr dot wroc dot pl>
To: help at octave dot org
Date: Thu, 18 Nov 2004 19:01:05 +0100

On Thu, Nov 18, 2004 at 08:09:53AM -0800, Robert A. Macy wrote:
> >From the octave prompt I type in...
> cd \\
> the directory does indeed change to the root directory
> 
> however if I type...
> cd Documents and Settings
> or...
> cd Documents\ and\ Settings

... and  doesn't work:

cd Documents\\ and\\ Settings

:)

> or...
> cd Documents<sp>and<sp>Settings

I think here are real spaces ;)

> all give an error msg of...
> error: Documents: No such file or directory
> 
> However, typing in...
> cd "Documents and Settings"
> does work
> 
> I was very surprised that the 2nd attempt above using
> backslashes does not work.  

If you know octave internals you wouldn't ;)

The octave parsing engine is build on a standard lex/yacc(bison) chain. Lex
separates from it input (character)stream so called atoms by chopping the
stream on boundaries defined by spaces (simplifing description for our
case). And finally stream of atoms is interpreted by octave grammar built on
yacc rules.

In above example you have four atoms interpreted as "cd"-command with three
arguments where second and third are silly ignored (octave should there
signal an error but it didn't).

Octave doesn't have a rule for "\ " as a non-breaking space :) 
Example I described for running regedit, was for cygwin shell (I assume it's
bash).

Mirek



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