This seems like a variation of other security problems: you can fix certain endpoints but treat what’s in the middle as a kind of “sewer” that you’ll never be a

This seems like a variation of other security problems: you can fix certain endpoints but treat what’s in the middle as a kind of “sewer” that you’ll never be able to clean up entirely. If you fix certain filesystems to restrict characters, you know whatever runs on them is fine and then you just have to deal with data-in, data-out (e.g. if a program has problems renaming its files when copying, that program needs to change but maybe not everything needs to change). I’m sure even this could be tricky; I think as long as the absolute path to the “safe” filesystem is using only safe characters, any target in the tree should be OK to use with even the sloppiest script. I don’t think it is realistic at all to update all tools to deal with this (certainly not shell scripts). For one, it is a lot of work to fix just one tool and usually there are so many programs in an infrastructure that you’d have to fix all of them before you could begin using carelessly-named files. Also, maintenance always introduces the risk of bugs; your carefully-written script will eventually be ruined by someone adding a new argument that handles file names poorly, I’m sure. If a program must be fixed, it has to be changed in a way that is maintenance-proof. For example, if the only way for a script to even find a file is to use an intermediate API, that is safe; someone can carelessly hack your program later to add a new file option but at least they’d only be able to get that working by using the same file API, and it would remain safe. There are now systems that obfuscate the locations of files (e.g. containers in auto-generated weird paths for security and other purposes). We also have situations where the file’s name in an interface may not mirror the filesystem (e.g. a name of a standard directory can be localized and appear to be called something entirely different, in the local language, than it is on disk). Thus, intermediaries aren’t that new of a concept, and if you need to update programs for security purposes anyway then you can fix this problem at the same time.