Re: [9fans] spaces in file/dir names? (and acme)?

[rog@vitanuova.com]

> it's entirely reasonable to optimize for the comman (and
> in this case, simple) case, and have people who want to
> uses spaces in file names go through a little extra work
> to use these tools. it would seem a much more tractable
> problem to make acme/plumbing deal with exact text
> strings - as they pretty much do already - which might
> include spaces than to try and have them figure out
> where the magic delimiters are.

but by using a special "space" character to represent spaces in
filenames you get all your desirable behaviour for free, and don't
have to worry about broken up text (rc-style quotes aren't
synchronisable which doesn't mix well with the generally editable text
in acme and rio), the fact you can no longer parse filenames with sed
or awk, or the visual confusion of having something that looks like
two filenames but is in fact one.  (should acme quote the filename in
its tag text?)

god knows how many times i've written stuff like:

	du -a . | awk '{print $2}'

or (in inferno)

	(n, toks) := sys->tokenize(line, " \t\n");
	filename := hd toks;

by making a literal space illegal in filenames, many things are
simplified; conversely if it's legal, many old assumptions are
potentially broken, and a fair amount of code becomes gratuituously
more complex and error-prone.

i was so happy when i first read that plan 9 didn't allow spaces in
its filenames, "hurray, i can use the backquote operator and not worry
about it!".  i hope we don't have to go back to the old days.

  cheers,
    rog.