> Slash is the ONLY character you're not allowed to have under Unix. There are no good reasons to disallow spaces. Disallowing characters in file names that you

> Slash is the ONLY character you're not allowed to have under Unix. There are no good reasons to disallow spaces. Disallowing characters in file names that you're allowed to have solves absolutely no problems, it only causes them. I think that there are more good reasons to disallow spaces than slashes. For one, it is very useful to have a natural character to separate filenames in a string. Then your bash scripts can be simpler! :) > trick Unix into putting slashes into file names via NFS, and Unix would totally shit itself when that happened LOL. I love this stuff. There is a similar trick that you can play today to wreak havoc on osx systems. You commit into a git repository a new file whose name only differs in case with an existing one, and ask a mac user to update the repo. Hilarity ensues. > If you think nobody would ever want to use a space or a slash in a file name, then you should get out more often and talk to real people in the real world. There are more of them than you seem to believe! But these users should not see the filename anyway, but the "title" of the document, which can be stored inside the file and can have whatever character they want. At the minimum, the user-facing interface can convert user-typed spaces into another character (e.g., a unicode non-breaking space) when writing the file into the filesystem. Raw spaces in filenames are an abomination that make shell scripting unnecessarily difficult. I would love a mount option that disallow the appearance of such things in my disk.