Convert file path from Linux to Windows format for Wine tool

Question

I have a Windows diff tool that's simply better than any Linux diff tool I've found (and I've done some pretty extensive analysis on visual diff tools). I want to use that tool on Linux (via Wine) and be able to pass Linux file paths to it, in part because two-pane file managers like Double Commander automatically pass the full file paths when calling the diff tool.

So I'm asking the reverse of this question: How can I convert the Linux-style file paths, including escaping characters such as spaces, to Windows-style file paths that would be accepted by a Windows tool ran via Wine?

For a simplistic example,

Input:

/path/to/file1.ext /path/to/file2.ext

Output

"\path\to\file1.ext" "\path\to\file2.ext"

Of course, in the real world, files can have spaces and whatnot, so I'm looking for a solution more reliable than the bash substitution I have so far:

#!/bin/bash
p1=$1
p2=$2
wine /utils/wincmp.exe ${p1//\//\\} ${p2//\//\\}

Answer 1

Your script is actually very close. All that you need is the winepath tool, that comes as part of WINE, to do the conversion:

#!/bin/sh
exec wine /utils/wincmp.exe "`winepath --windows \"$1\"`" "`winepath --windows \"$2\"`"

Or using Laurent Bercot's execline:

#!/command/execlineb -S2
backtick -i left { winepath --windows $1 }
backtick -i right { winepath --windows $2 }
multisubstitute {
    importas left left
    importas right right
}
wine 
/utils/wincmp.exe ${left} ${right}

Answer 2

1. Always double-quote your variables so that you don't need to care about spaces or shell meta-characters.

2. you can use sed or tr to convert /s to \. e.g. sed 's:/:\\:g' or tr '/' '\\' (note: because \ is the shell escape character, it needs to be escaped to be treated as a literal backslash).

3. Alternatively, bash's string manipulation operators will do the job (but aren't posix standard, so aren't portable). The only mistake you made there was in not quoting the variables.

But note that, as mentioned by @Michael Homer, it shouldn't be necessary to modify the path separator...I've certainly had no difficulty running wine program.exe /unix/path/to/file in the past.

resulting in:

#!/bin/bash

p1="$1"
p2="$2"

# optional transformation
p1="$(printf "%s" "$p1" | tr '/' '\\')"
p2="$(printf "%s" "$p2" | tr '/' '\\')"

wine /utils/wincmp.exe "$p1" "$p2"

or

#!/bin/bash

p1="${1//\//\\}"
p2="${2//\//\\}"

wine /utils/wincmp.exe "$p1" "$p2"

or even:

#!/bin/bash
wine /utils/wincmp.exe "${1//\//\\}" "${2//\//\\}"

(but this last version doesn't give you any opportunity to sanity-check the file arguments, or do any kind of option handling - e.g. with getopts)

---

Finally, you may want to reconsider your preference for a Windows diff tool, or at least conduct a more thorough survey before deciding (you've only evaluated a small subset of available tools and GUI wrappers). A Windows/wine based tool will not integrate pleasantly into Linux/UNIX-based development workflow.

(personally, I mostly use either diff -u or colordiff -u piped into less. Given that I'm working with text files, there's no need for a GUI interface. It's also identical to what I get from git diff etc. On the rare occasions I need a side-by-side diff, I mostly use sdiff).