From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
Message-ID: <3836cdc8ae26a647faee7362292032c2@collyer.net>
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Subject: Re: [9fans] spaces in file/dir names? (and acme)?
From: Geoff Collyer <geoff@collyer.net>
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Date: Thu, 30 May 2002 10:46:36 -0700
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Spaces in file names are a curse.  I have to live with them everyday
on Mac OS X, and it's maddening.  File names are supposed to be simple
identifiers, not your whole entire life story, complete with 8×10
colour glossy photos and bibliography.  (Yeah, that's what we can do
with 64k-byte file names: put a little JPEG and the md5 hash of the
file contents in every file name.  User-friendly, like.)

Having said that, we do have whitespace other than the canonical
space, tab and newline available, and these other characters have no
special meaning to most software yet:

00a0	no-break space
2002	en space
2003	em space
2004	three-per-em space
2005	four-per-em space
2006	six-per-em space
2007	figure space
2008	punctuation space
2009	thin space
200a	hair space
200b	zero width space
2420	symbol for space
3000	ideographic space
303f	ideographic half fill space
feff	zero width no-break space

If one *must* put spaces in file names, using one of these will cause
less grief than space, tab or newline, though there is likely to still
be visual confusion for the poor users.