5 ms·

You seem to be imagining some sort of situation where bash is used to deal with input from customers (random users). You do not use bash for that. Filenames wit

You seem to be imagining some sort of situation where bash is used to deal with input from customers (random users). You do not use bash for that. Filenames with spaces (lol) do not happen unless you do it yourself. Bash is useful for productivity when getting stuff done. For the work I do (where code never comes close to a customer and one-off tasks are common), if a candidate were to write a python script for the example line of bash I would be strongly biased towards rejecting them.

saagarjha 8y ago
> Filenames with spaces (lol) do not happen unless you do it yourself. This is a cop out. File names can totally contain spaces, and the difference between the Bash and Python solution is that one will continue to work when a file with spaces inevitably shows up and one will fail, possibly silently.
- Nimitz14 8y ago
  What do you do that causes filenames to appear with spaces? And why do you not fix the cause instead of forcing yourself to deal with the possibility of a filename with a space in every possible situation?
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
jerf 8y ago
My real point about security is not that it is always in play per se, but that the naive Python will tend to do the right thing and the naive bash will not, and that's a non-trivial difference between the two. It goes beyond security. Generally as soon as you step out of bash into perl/python/ruby/whatever, you get an immediate boost to correctness of all kinds, unless you go out of your way to be sloppy. Yes, even Perl is an instant correctness boost. As for file names not having spaces in them, after I said I personally don't use spaces in my file names, find -name '* *' | wc -l on my home directory here yielded 12985. Uncompressed archives I'm not the source of. Dot directions I did not creat. Some tmp files. Probably the majority of my media files, which are the bulk of that number, named in all sorts of different ways that only share in common that I didn't pick them. An Anki directory. Yeah. They happen. (Also, because I know someone's gonna try to go for the zinger here, I am not being hypocritical. I do not have an objection to one-off scripting jobs, especially ones like this that are read-only so there is no permanent consequence for error.)
h1d 8y ago
This attitude is where it brings unexpected bugs in the long run. Don't expect but just be sure.

saagarjha 8y ago

> Filenames with spaces (lol) do not happen unless you do it yourself. This is a cop out. File names can totally contain spaces, and the difference between the Bash and Python solution is that one will continue to work when a file with spaces inevitably shows up and one will fail, possibly silently.

Nimitz14 8y ago
What do you do that causes filenames to appear with spaces? And why do you not fix the cause instead of forcing yourself to deal with the possibility of a filename with a space in every possible situation?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]

jerf 8y ago

My real point about security is not that it is always in play per se, but that the naive Python will tend to do the right thing and the naive bash will not, and that's a non-trivial difference between the two. It goes beyond security. Generally as soon as you step out of bash into perl/python/ruby/whatever, you get an immediate boost to correctness of all kinds, unless you go out of your way to be sloppy. Yes, even Perl is an instant correctness boost. As for file names not having spaces in them, after I said I personally don't use spaces in my file names, find -name '* *' | wc -l on my home directory here yielded 12985. Uncompressed archives I'm not the source of. Dot directions I did not creat. Some tmp files. Probably the majority of my media files, which are the bulk of that number, named in all sorts of different ways that only share in common that I didn't pick them. An Anki directory. Yeah. They happen. (Also, because I know someone's gonna try to go for the zinger here, I am not being hypocritical. I do not have an objection to one-off scripting jobs, especially ones like this that are read-only so there is no permanent consequence for error.)

h1d 8y ago

This attitude is where it brings unexpected bugs in the long run. Don't expect but just be sure.