Hear hear! Terminal escapes... you know what, they may seem ridiculous, but they work with a read/write API instead of an ioctl API, and that makes all the dif

Hear hear! Terminal escapes... you know what, they may seem ridiculous, but they work with a read/write API instead of an ioctl API, and that makes all the difference. And they work with serial ports and terminals. From day 1 terminals were read/write-oriented, not ioctl-oriented, and the concept of escapes originates with the terminal vendors, not with Unix. Regarding command-line parsing, there are ways to move to a Unix-style argument array in a way that is backwards-compatible. It could just be an attribute of the executable to exec(), that it wants a proper argument vector. Shell escaping in Windows is just not-sane.