Launching 32-bit applications from batchfiles on Win64

I've been running the 64-bit version of Windows 7 RC since June. It's been quite painless on the whole.

One wrinkle that I ran into was with some batchfiles which launch applications in %ProgramFiles% (normally C:\Program Files). Due to the magic WOW64 redirector, 32-bit applications are actually installed into %ProgramFiles(x86)%—normally C:\Program Files (x86)—instead of %ProgramFiles%. This is transparent to the 32-bit applications, which think they're running in %ProgramFiles% (C:\Program Files).

However, the cmd.exe shell is 64-bit (unless you make a special effort to run the 32-bit cmd.exe in SysWOW64), so batchfiles see the 64-bit %ProgramFiles% which contains 64-bit applications.

Hence, a batchfile that launches an installed 32-bit application on Win64 must use %ProgramFiles(x86)%, not %ProgramFiles%.

It sounds trivial to have a batchfile detect which flavor of %ProgramFiles% it should use, but the parentheses in the environment variable name make it tricky to parse. On earlier versions of Win64, the environment variable was called %ProgramFilesx86%. Presumably they added the strange parentheses into the variable name because the directory name always included them.

Here's a tiny batchfile that will launch the 32-bit DiffMerge correctly on both Win64 and Win32 platforms.

@setlocal
@set _pf=%ProgramFiles%
@if not "[%ProgramFiles(x86)%]"=="[]" set _pf=%ProgramFiles(x86)%
@start "" /b "%_pf%\SourceGear\DiffMerge\DiffMerge.exe" %*

I long ago found that the safest way to test environment variables whose values may include spaces, is to surround them with both double quotes and square brackets.