[tex-live] How to do the following?

[Philip TAYLOR]

Which operating system, which [La]TeX implementation ?

David Kastrup wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I want to call some executable, preloading a format and running a
> file that might contain spaces in the file name.
> 
> latex &format "file name with spaces"
> 
> does not work whereas
> 
> latex "file name with spaces"
> 
> would actually work, but not preload a format.
> 
> In a similar vein,
> 
> latex "&format name with spaces"
> 
> does not work.
> 
> And for dumping a format based on LaTeX, neither
> 
> latex -ini "&latex" "file name with spaces"
> 
> nor
> 
> latex -ini -fmtname latex "file name with spaces"
> 
> will work.  The first fails because of the spaces, the second does not
> bother to preload latex.fmt.
> 
> This is not all too convincing and/or consistent.
>