Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

"J. Lewis Muir" <[email protected]> · Tue, 22 May 2018 17:57:41 -0500

On 05/22, Johnson, Andrew N. wrote:
> Try using forward slashes instead of back-slashes, and also enclose the whole file path inside double quotes.

Bingo!  That worked!  Thank you!

Is this practice generally recommended for all Windows pathnames in
an EPICS context?  Perhaps I should narrow this to all pathnames that
do not start with the pathname component separator (i.e., slash or
backslash)?  I'm not sure.  The idea is to avoid breaking any Windows
commands that take options that start with a slash and might get
confused. (?) But maybe if all pathnames eventually get turned into
absolute pathnames, everything works out.  I've been faithfully using
the backslash to separate path components, but I noticed that a lot
of the pathnames generated by the EPICS build system include slashes,
so many of the pathnames end up containing a mix of backslashes and
slashes; it looks horrible, but it seems to work (except for msi).

Say I'm configuring the asyn EPICS module in <asyn>\configure\RELEASE,
is it better to set "SUPPORT=C:/opt/epics-module" and
"EPICS_BASE=C:/opt/epics-base" rather than using the normal Windows
backslash path component separator?  For me, I think it's going to
be essential since I'd like to use macros in the file directive in a
template substitution file, and as your suggestion has shown, pathnames
must use backslashes, not slashes, in order for msi to work!

What about in <EPICS Base>\startup\win32.bat?  I'm guessing everything
in there should still be using the backslash because all of those values
are being interpreted by Windows programs.  Although, just looking at it
again, I see in the optional environment variables section commented out
lines like "set HOME=c:/users/jba".  Maybe that's just for use with a
Cygwin program, though; I don't know.

BTW, it also worked without the double quotes.  This is consistent with
the template file syntax at:

  https://epics.anl.gov/base/R3-14/12-docs/AppDevGuide/node7.html#SECTION007220000000000000000

which says:

  The file name may appear inside double quotation marks; these are
  required if the name contains any characters that are not in the
  following set, or if it contains environment variable macros of the
  form ${ENV_VAR_NAME} which are to be expanded before the file is
  opened:

    a-z A-Z 0-9 _ + - . / \ : ; [ ] < >

Since the pathname didn't contain any characters outside of the above
set, and since it didn't contain an environment variable macro of the
specified form, I concluded that double quotes were not needed.

Thanks!

Lewis

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System