3 ms·

I agree, if you ever want whitespace to have any special meaning in your shell (and you do), allowing spaces within filenames just causes no end of headaches.

• ygra 10y ago
  For interactive use, tab completion already takes care of the escaping. For anything else the actual headache is that things are passed around as strings and command argument parsing is done for the expanded string where spaces can cause different argument parsing unexpectedly. This is certainly not limited to filenames but any argument that can contain spaces and is passed to a different command without proper quoting. The very fact that it's so easy to get wrong is perhaps a sign that things are a bit broken. But not necessarily at the filesystem level ...