Suppose I'm using LAME on Windows via a command prompt window, and I want to set an ID3 tag, specifically, say, set the name of the artist to something like this:

      Fred "Mad Dog" Smith

I obviously can't do:

      lame --ta "Fred "Mad Dog" Smith"...

...as that completely screws up command line parsing. I could give up on the double quotes, and settle for:

      lame --ta "Fred 'Mad Dog' Smith"...

But what if I really want to keep the double quotes? *nix makes this easy with backslash escaping and also having the option of using single quotes to wrap a command-line arg, but none of that helps on Windows. (Yes, I could use Cygwin or the like, but I'd still like to know if there's a solution for Windows own command prompt.)

I've Googled all sorts of combinations of search strings, however, and I can't even find a generalized discussion about how Windows parses command line arguments. I've tried backslashes, single quotes, two quotes in a row... nothing resolves to a double quote as part of the command line arg.

This might be more of a general Windows question instead of a LAME question, unless of course LAME has its own escaping that it uses that I don't know about.

Ah hah! Backslash escaping of quotes does work, if I'm directly executing the LAME command.

I was trying to pass arguments through a JavaScript, executed at the command line via the 'cscript' command. The problem is not being able to pass quotes to the script. How something as basic as parsing command line args, which I'd think would be universal and consistent, can be different from one command line tool to another, I don't know.