Re: [9fans] spaces in filenames (and filesystems...)

[Ethan Grammatikidis <eekee57@fastmail.fm>]

On 28 Apr 2011, at 1:11 pm, Digby Tarvin wrote:

> On Thu, Apr 28, 2011 at 11:58:01AM +0200, Peter A. Cejchan wrote:
>> spaces in filenames.. does not it break the rules?? Who actually
>> needs
>> them??

Well, for one thing it's much more natural to type a space than a
hyphen or an underscore. For another, I for one am not likely to go
through my system renaming the kajillion files I have with spaces in
their names, particularly because I'm not sure what would break if I
did.

>>
>> ++pac
>
> Mostly people who have grown up with graphical user interfaces and
> have no appreciation of the command line parsing complexity it
> adds I think. And of course others that have to interract with
> such people, such as sharing filesystems with them.

I'm surprised nobody's noted that rc handles spaces in filenames with
far less complexity than Bourne shell. Bourne shell makes things
complex by getting all paranoid-obsessive over word-splitting: it
must do it at every possible opportunity unless explicitly commanded
otherwise using a quoting method which also has other effects.

rc is much more sensible, handling spaces transparently in my typical
usage: I pick a unique bit out of the middle of the filename and
surround that with asterisks. rc does not attempt to split the
resultant word whatever you do with it. Perhaps the eval builtin will
split it but not much else will.

Parsing the output of programs which return filenames is the only
common case where I see any complexity from spaces, and then the
complexity only consists of setting and reverting $ifs. Granted that
could be smoother still, especially where you want a big file list in
for().

> On a slightly related topics, one of my constant headaches lately
> is the problem of deciding what filesystem to put on large capacity
> removeable storage to give me maximum interoperability...

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