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Spaces in filenames create troubles with almost every command line tool. cut(1), awk(1), find(1), xargs(1), what not. How do you quote them, do you need to use
by gkya 9y ago
Spaces in filenames create troubles with almost every command line tool. cut(1), awk(1), find(1), xargs(1), what not. How do you quote them, do you need to use \0 as a separator instead, do other commands on the pipeline support \0 separators? What happens after a couple expansions, passing stuff from one script to another?
And what the heck happened on 31 dec 1999 that the world became a different place where suddenly people realised: there were these space things, quite useful they were, why don't we tuck them into every file name and URL and who knows what?
People have better things to do than dealing with these things.
- josteink 9y ago> Spaces in filenames create troubles with almost every command line tool Then that's a shortcoming which should be addressed with the tools, because humans everywhere use spaces in filenames. For every command-line tool I make (Windows & Linux), I ensure it handles such trivial use-cases. I can't see why such a simple task is seemingly impossible to get done in GNU coreutils.
- gkya 9y agoVery good of you indeed, but it's a hard task to retroactively change how a system and the greater community around it behaves and how standards like POSIX have defined field separation syntax for decades. I wouldn't mind if make supported spaces in filenames, but the thing is it's a bit late now and the problem is too unimportant to bother solving, frankly.