Everyone quotes command line arguments the wrong way is quite funny, in a sad way, and it is wrong. As wrong as any other program attempting to quote on Windows. It is a game that you simply can not win.

You explained the basic problem: Arguments are passed to programs as a single string on systems derived from CP/M (i.e. DOS, Windows, OS/2), and programs (or the underlying runtime libraries) decide how to split that single string into arguments (see also Re^3: Perl Rename). Backwards compatibility to ancient DOS and WinNT, including bugs in command.com and cmd.exe, have lead to a ridiculous amount of complex rules for quoting and escaping.

The CommandLineToArgV convention mentioned in "Everyone quotes command line arguments the wrong way" is just that - a convention. All programs are free to use different quoting rules, and at least legacy programs do have different rules. (I did not look up or test, but I would not be surprised if cygwin-based programs would implement very different quoting rules, or even use a cygwin-only way to pass argv[] around, with a command line string only as fallback for non-cygwin programs.)

Pretending that this convention is universal for all programs, and claiming that code that escapes and quotes according to the convention is the only correct solution, would be really funny, if it was posted by a noob in some dusty corner of the internet or our local universal expert. Posting that at microsoft.com is just sad.

Unix has gone a long way, but the authors got argument passing right at the first attempt (i.e. fork() and exec()). And based on that lucky API, they made argument-splitting a problem of the shell, so you can use exactly the same quoting for all invoked programs. Over time, the shells got rid of most argument-splitting and argument-passing problems. That made quoting rules on Unix quite simple (but still far from being perfect). The best thing is that on Unix, you don't have to invoke the shell at all, so you don't have to quote at all. You pass a list of arguments to exec(), and main() will get exactly that list in argv[].

Alexander