{"id":29533,"date":"2006-09-29T10:00:06","date_gmt":"2006-09-29T10:00:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/2006\/09\/29\/quotation-marks-around-spaces-arent-necessary-in-the-path-environment-variable\/"},"modified":"2006-09-29T10:00:06","modified_gmt":"2006-09-29T10:00:06","slug":"quotation-marks-around-spaces-arent-necessary-in-the-path-environment-variable","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20060929-06\/?p=29533","title":{"rendered":"Quotation marks around spaces aren&#039;t necessary in the PATH environment variable"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The purpose of quotation marks is to allow a character that would normally be interpreted as a delimiter to be included as part of a file name. Most of the time, this delimiter is the space. The <code>CreateProcess<\/code> function uses a space to separate the program name from its arguments. Most programs separate their command line arguments with a space. But the <code>PATH<\/code> environment variable doesn&#8217;t use spaces to separate directories. It uses semicolons.\n This means that if you want to add a directory with spaces in its name to the path, you don&#8217;t need quotation marks since spaces mean nothing to the <code>PATH<\/code> environment variable. The quotation marks don&#8217;t hurt, mind you, but they don&#8217;t help either.<\/p>\n<p> On the other hand, if the directory you want to add contains a semicolon in its name, then you do need the quotation marks, because it&#8217;s the semicolon that you need to protect. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The purpose of quotation marks is to allow a character that would normally be interpreted as a delimiter to be included as part of a file name. Most of the time, this delimiter is the space. The CreateProcess function uses a space to separate the program name from its arguments. Most programs separate their command [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[104],"class_list":["post-29533","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-tipssupport"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"<p>The purpose of quotation marks is to allow a character that would normally be interpreted as a delimiter to be included as part of a file name. Most of the time, this delimiter is the space. The CreateProcess function uses a space to separate the program name from its arguments. Most programs separate their command [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29533","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29533"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29533\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29533"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29533"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29533"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}