[tex-live] TeX Live 2013 : Why does "Kpsewhich" give output in wrong format on Windows

[Khaled Hosny]

On Tue, Sep 17, 2013 at 11:08:58AM +0100, Philip Taylor wrote:
> Endeavouring to find out for myself where XeTeX's predefined
> \lang@<whatever>s were stored, I typed (at the TeX Live
> command prompt) :
> 
> 	kpsewhich language.def
> 
> The answer given was :
> 
> 	c:/texlive/2013/texmf-var/tex/generic/config/language.def
> 
> When I then attempted to paste this into a CD command, I was told :
> 
> 	The directory name is invalid.
> 
> Why does Kpsewhich not respect platform conventions for the
> direction of slashes in file paths ?

That is a limitation of the cmd.exe shell, MS Windows (and even MS-DOS,
starting from version 2.0) is very capable of handing forward slash in
URLs try pasting the URL in Windows Explorer.

Regards,
Khaled