White Space Help

[Skaperen]

all the operating systems i know break up the arguments from a command and pass just the parts to the program.  so for a program named foo when you type in the command foo abc xyz the program named foo is given the command line arguments as abc and xyz.  if you type it in like   foo    abc      xyz   it still gets the same thing.  to get the exact characters the way they were typed in, the program would have to dig around inside the operating system for it.  while that could be done in Microsoft DOS and early IBM mainframes, newer, more secure operating systems don't let programs have that access in most cases. as described above, when you want spaces to be given to a program, put quotes around each argument and put the spaces you want the program to get inside the quotes like foo "abc  " "  xyz".  you can give it all spaces like foo "      " or even an empty string like foo "".  in most cases you can use either double quotes or single quote (just end each string with the same kind of quote).