So I've been evaluating Jam as a build tool for my company, and basically I like it. However, our project is Windows-based, and I ran into the problem of jam not being able to spawn the compiler & tools if the path name contains an embedded space character. Unfortunately this is the default for MSVC, and I noticed from the archives of this mailing list that I'm not the first to butt heads with this problem.

Anyway, the consensus workarounds from the list archives were:

1. don't use spaces in the paths of tools.

2. use the 8.3 aliases of the paths (e.g. "c:/Progra~1/" instead of "c:/Program Files/").

Neither workaround is acceptable to me. The first for legitimate political reasons; this is a Windows shop and I only have so much leeway to inconvenience people, and the second because the 8.3 alias is not reliable -- e.g. on my workstation, "c:/Progra~1/Micros~1" aliases to "c:/Program Files/microsoft frontpage", which is not going to find the compiler! It's a marginally OK, but cheesy, workaround for a single workstation.

Anyway, the point of all this is that after perusing the Jam source code, I discovered a very simple workaround that seems to actually work, on my Win2K box at least. Put the following line in your Jamrules:

JAMSHELL = cmd /C % ;

and make sure your tools path has quotes around it when Jam spawns the command line, for example these are the definitions from my sample Xbox project (which uses a special version of the MSVC tools):

JAMSHELL = cmd /C % ; XDK = "c:/Program Files/Microsoft Xbox SDK" ; VISUALC = "$(XDK)/xbox/bin/vc7" ; C++ = \"$(VISUALC)/cl.exe\" ; LINK = \"$(XDK)/xbox/bin/vc7/link.exe\" ; AR = \"$(XDK)/xbox/bin/vc7/lib.exe\" ;

Note the \" around the tool .exe's. I also found I needed to put \" 's around various include and lib paths in the command-line switches.

Hope this helps; I didn't come across this workaround in the list archives. Apologies if it's in the FAQ or something. If it's not, it should be!

-Thatcher Ulrich