Puppet Windows: Spaces in file paths a problem?

[Mohamed Lrhazi]

I thought I read somewhere in Puppet docs/wiki... that it is
"recommended" to avoid spaces in file paths, or some similar verbiage,
but now I cant find it.

Does Puppet have any known issues with spaces in file paths? It would
of course scare Windows admins away... So I hope I am wrong in
thinking I read that.

Thanks a lot,
Mohamed.

[Mohamed Lrhazi]

I found where I read what I read... not directly Puppet, but Ruby:

https://github.com/oneclick/rubyinstaller/wiki/Troubleshooting:

"If you notice those directories contain spaces, it might be because
you installed Ruby in a folder with spaces (highly not recommended)
or..."

Thanks,
Mohamed.

[Josh Cooper]

Hi Mohamed,

I ran into trouble with spaces in file paths when setting RUBYLIB (in batch files that run our windows rspec tests). I had to convert the paths to their short names and convert backslashes to forward slashes. Without this, ruby would not load from files in directories with spaces.

set PWD=%CD%

for %%f in ("%PWD%") do set SHORT_PWD=%%~sf

set RUBYLIB=%RUBYLIB%;%SHORT_PWD%/vendor/facter/lib

set RUBYLIB=%RUBYLIB:\=/%

Josh

--
Josh Cooper

Developer, Puppet Labs

[Mohamed Lrhazi]

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Thanks Josh.

I run into an issue where this Exec would fail if the variable has a
space in it:

command => "$splunk_home\\bin\\splunk.exe start",

but then again that could happen in Unix just as well, not really
Windows specific.

I had to write:

command => "\"$splunk_home\\bin\\splunk.exe\" start",

So I am concluding that from the Puppet end-user perspective, there no
special issue with spaces in path names, at least not as a Windows
specific concern.

Thanks a lot,
Mohamed.

[Josh Cooper]

On Mon, Nov 28, 2011 at 3:56 PM, Mohamed Lrhazi <lrh...@gmail.com> wrote:

Thanks Josh.

I run into an issue where this Exec would fail if the variable has a
space in it:

command => "$splunk_home\\bin\\splunk.exe start",

but then again that could happen in Unix just as well, not really
Windows specific.

I had to write:

command => "\"$splunk_home\\bin\\splunk.exe\" start",

So I am concluding that from the Puppet end-user perspective, there no
special issue with spaces in path names, at least not as a Windows
specific concern.

Yep, the command needs to be quoted because it is a string with potentially multiple arguments. I don't know of any specific Windows issues with spaces, aside from the RUBYLIB issue mentioned earlier, but do let us know if you run into something.

Josh