Posix accepts any character (means any byte value) in filenames except '/' and NULL. The escaping of spaces are only needed for things like shell scripts, so the shell doesn't split the path at the ' '.

AFAIK winepath from the Wine project, also doesn't escape spaces when converting a Windows path to a Unix path.

If you need to escape them, you may have to specify how a Posix path should look like.

The thing that makes the conversation hard is that there is no way to map 1:1. In windows you have different letters for partitions, which letter is mounted where in the / structure?

Ah, I didn't understand that it was the shell that needed the escaping.

And yeah, found that mapping problem too - which I can work around locally.

So that means escaping or swapping the '/' is the only thing that needs to be done.

This is the answer I'm after, thanks!

Well, there are special filenames in Windows such as CON, COM, and NUL. If you have such a filename you need a bit more logic to convert them. For example CON2 would be something like /dev/ttyS1, /dev/ttyUSB0, /dev/ttyAMA0 .... You probably shouldn't use this filenames anyway.