The Wild West of Windows command line parsing
&gt; Many runtimes, including Microsoft’s own CRTs, don’t call GetCommandLineW and instead do their own parsing.<p>I think that&#x27;s supposed to be CommandLineToArgv here.<p>As many others, I started on dos, then Windows and finally Linux. When I switched to Linux I found it really odd that the parsing is done by the shell, and how you can&#x27;t know whether the user typed in a lot of jpg files or the shell expanded *.jpg. but the more I used it, the more reasonable it appeared. You almost never really need to know whether the shell expanded something or not. There is no ambiguity between programs, as the article also mentions. This has bitten me in Windows before, but was somehow just a fact of life. Quoting on Linux is consistent. On Windows, the first time you want to enter a command line that contains multiple literal &quot; and spaces, you want to jump off the nearest cliff. Except you don&#x27;t if you never used anything else, because it&#x27;s just normal that every program uses somewhat different parsing rules.