[adityachaudhary99]

Closes #447

Paths with spaces, surrounding quotes, a leading tilde, Git-Bash style /c/foo prefixes, or 8.3 short names could fail when configured as allowed directories.

• New parseAllowedDirectories() normalizes every argv entry before validation: trim, strip one pair of surrounding quotes, expand leading ~, win32-only /c/foo to C:\foo conversion, resolve
• Startup symlink resolution switched to realpathSync.native(), which also expands Windows 8.3 short names
• README gains a Windows paths usage subsection

Tests: extended path-utils suite + win32-gated startup spawn tests; green locally on Windows 11.
Note: submitted alongside #470; whichever merges second rebases cleanly (both touch the index.ts startup block).

[Copilot]

Copilot was unable to review this pull request because the user who requested the review has reached their quota limit.

[cliffhall]

Thank you for this pull request, and apologies for the long wait for a response.

Since it was opened, the reference servers have been rebuilt for the 2026-07-28 MCP specification (#4857) and released as v2 (2.0.0 on npm for the TypeScript servers, 2026.10.19 on PyPI for the Python servers). The code this PR changes has been replaced, and the behavior it addresses has either been fixed in v2 or no longer exists in the same form.

This is not a judgment on the change or on you; it's a consequence of the code it targets having been replaced. If the problem still happens on v2, please open a fresh issue with the version you're running and steps to reproduce. Note that this repository now accepts contributions as issues rather than pull requests from anyone but its maintainers; see CONTRIBUTING.md.

This is part of the backlog triage in #4875.