Command Line Representation

The command line stored by VOV is a space-separated list of tokens. In order to allow arguments to have spaces and other special characters, the following rules apply:

• If an argument contains a space, the whole argument must be double-quoted:

  % vw2 echo "Ciao bello"

• If an argument contains a double quote, the quote must be escaped with a "\"

  % vw2 echo Ciao\"bello
  % vw2 echo 'This is a quote: \"'
  % vw2 cc -DHEADER=\"hello.h\" -c hello.c

• If an argument contains a backslash "\" it must be escaped with another backslash:

  % vw2 echo "this is a backslash \\"