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Curious about PowerShell misbehaving there. Care to share any details? Typically you never want to handle paths to files as strings, or at least resolve them to

by ygra 4y ago

Curious about PowerShell misbehaving there. Care to share any details? Typically you never want to handle paths to files as strings, or at least resolve them to File/DirectoryInfo objects as soon as possible. But the only real blunder regarding paths in PowerShell I'm aware of is the Path parameter to various cmdlets and having [] in file names (which is why LiteralPath always exists alongside Path parameters).

nicetryguy 4y ago
$args[x] breaks. Get-Content breaks. probably more. ...admittedly i'm not the best with Powershell. There are probably workarounds or things that i did wrong.
- justeleblanc 4y ago
  Just put them in quotes. PowerShell is infinitely better than bash/zsh/... at handling spaces. You're spreading nonsense.
  - nicetryguy 4y ago
    > Just use quotes bro Man, it's never that simple. How about generating Powershell scripts with quotes? Sometimes you are dealing with escape characters \", sometimes you aren't. Why bother with all that? Hell, versions of software and compilers change such behaviors either on purpose or by accident all the time. It just gets messy dude. C:\NEVER_~1\AGAIN_~1.NOP Perhaps i'm a dinosaur still scarred by the golden olden days, but, there is no convincing me that whitespace in filenames or URLs is ever a good idea.
    - justeleblanc 4y ago
      I don't know what to tell you. You gave two examples that aren't actually issues. But if there's no convincing you, I won't bother. Have a nice day.
      - nicetryguy 4y ago
        > You gave two examples that aren't actually issues. Man, i've had config files break because i saved them in UTF-8 instead of ANSI. I hope to god you never have to experience the horror... You also have a nice day.
        justeleblanc 4y ago
        This is getting less and less relevant.
        LoganDark 4y ago
        > Man, i've had config files break because i saved them in UTF-8 instead of ANSI. Isn't this because random Windows tools add garbage bytes to the start of the file (a "byte order marker") and then don't tell you they did this? It's not the encoding that's the problem, it's the garbage bytes. P.S. I do know of exactly one program that only accepts UTF-16 for its config file, and won't accept UTF-8 or ANSI.
13of40 4y ago
Came here to mention []. For those who haven't looked it up, in addition to * and ? as wildcard characters, PowerShell supports "[xyz]" and "[a-z]", meaning "x y or z" and "anything from a to z", so "[a-z]alls" would match calls, falls, walls, etc. I knew the guy who tested the feature in PowerShell and he was deeply frustrated over the fact that there was no way to escape some sequences. For example, you can loosely match "[abc]" with something like "?abc?" or "[[]abc?" because the [[] indicates exactly one opening square bracket but there's no way (as far as I know) to say "this section ends with a square bracket". The PM really wanted that feature, though, even though you could probably count on one hand how many times it's been used in real life. Edit: That guy down there corrected my example.
- justeleblanc 4y ago
  Uh... You can escape these sequences. But the escape character isn't the backslash for obvious reasons (it's the path separator). It's the backtick. > ni '[abc]' Directory: C:\Users\<user> Mode LastWriteTime Length Name ---- ------------- ------ ---- -a--- 21/04/2023 12:23 0 [abc] > gi '[abc]' # no output - would have matched files named a, b, or c > gi '`[abc`]' Directory: C:\Users\<user> Mode LastWriteTime Length Name ---- ------------- ------ ---- -a--- 21/04/2023 12:23 0 [abc] > gi -LiteralPath '[abc]' Directory: C:\Users\<user> Mode LastWriteTime Length Name ---- ------------- ------ ---- -a--- 21/04/2023 12:23 0 [abc] > gi -lp '[abc]' Directory: C:\Users\<user> Mode LastWriteTime Length Name ---- ------------- ------ ---- -a--- 21/04/2023 12:23 0 [abc] As far as I know that's been in powershell forever.
  - 13of40 4y ago
    Ah, OK. This works because you're using single quotes on your strings, meaning the escape sequence `[ is preserved until it reaches the globbing layer. This will not work, for example... gi "`[abc`]" ...because the `[ will be processed before the string gets sent to globbing, meaning the back tick will be removed. This would work with double quotes: gi "``[abc``]" ...because at the command line level this will evaluate to `[abc`] and the globbing will know that the square brackets are literal. So I will concede and downgrade my complaint from "impossible" to merely "overly complicated for the layman".

by ygra 4y ago

nicetryguy 4y ago

$args[x] breaks. Get-Content breaks. probably more. ...admittedly i'm not the best with Powershell. There are probably workarounds or things that i did wrong.

justeleblanc 4y ago
Just put them in quotes. PowerShell is infinitely better than bash/zsh/... at handling spaces. You're spreading nonsense.
- nicetryguy 4y ago
  > Just use quotes bro Man, it's never that simple. How about generating Powershell scripts with quotes? Sometimes you are dealing with escape characters \", sometimes you aren't. Why bother with all that? Hell, versions of software and compilers change such behaviors either on purpose or by accident all the time. It just gets messy dude. C:\NEVER_~1\AGAIN_~1.NOP Perhaps i'm a dinosaur still scarred by the golden olden days, but, there is no convincing me that whitespace in filenames or URLs is ever a good idea.
  - justeleblanc 4y ago
    I don't know what to tell you. You gave two examples that aren't actually issues. But if there's no convincing you, I won't bother. Have a nice day.
    - nicetryguy 4y ago
      > You gave two examples that aren't actually issues. Man, i've had config files break because i saved them in UTF-8 instead of ANSI. I hope to god you never have to experience the horror... You also have a nice day.
      - justeleblanc 4y ago
        This is getting less and less relevant.
      - LoganDark 4y ago
        > Man, i've had config files break because i saved them in UTF-8 instead of ANSI. Isn't this because random Windows tools add garbage bytes to the start of the file (a "byte order marker") and then don't tell you they did this? It's not the encoding that's the problem, it's the garbage bytes. P.S. I do know of exactly one program that only accepts UTF-16 for its config file, and won't accept UTF-8 or ANSI.

13of40 4y ago

Came here to mention []. For those who haven't looked it up, in addition to * and ? as wildcard characters, PowerShell supports "[xyz]" and "[a-z]", meaning "x y or z" and "anything from a to z", so "[a-z]alls" would match calls, falls, walls, etc. I knew the guy who tested the feature in PowerShell and he was deeply frustrated over the fact that there was no way to escape some sequences. For example, you can loosely match "[abc]" with something like "?abc?" or "[[]abc?" because the [[] indicates exactly one opening square bracket but there's no way (as far as I know) to say "this section ends with a square bracket". The PM really wanted that feature, though, even though you could probably count on one hand how many times it's been used in real life. Edit: That guy down there corrected my example.

justeleblanc 4y ago
Uh... You can escape these sequences. But the escape character isn't the backslash for obvious reasons (it's the path separator). It's the backtick. > ni '[abc]' Directory: C:\Users\<user> Mode LastWriteTime Length Name ---- ------------- ------ ---- -a--- 21/04/2023 12:23 0 [abc] > gi '[abc]' # no output - would have matched files named a, b, or c > gi '`[abc`]' Directory: C:\Users\<user> Mode LastWriteTime Length Name ---- ------------- ------ ---- -a--- 21/04/2023 12:23 0 [abc] > gi -LiteralPath '[abc]' Directory: C:\Users\<user> Mode LastWriteTime Length Name ---- ------------- ------ ---- -a--- 21/04/2023 12:23 0 [abc] > gi -lp '[abc]' Directory: C:\Users\<user> Mode LastWriteTime Length Name ---- ------------- ------ ---- -a--- 21/04/2023 12:23 0 [abc] As far as I know that's been in powershell forever.
- 13of40 4y ago
  Ah, OK. This works because you're using single quotes on your strings, meaning the escape sequence `[ is preserved until it reaches the globbing layer. This will not work, for example... gi "`[abc`]" ...because the `[ will be processed before the string gets sent to globbing, meaning the back tick will be removed. This would work with double quotes: gi "``[abc``]" ...because at the command line level this will evaluate to `[abc`] and the globbing will know that the square brackets are literal. So I will concede and downgrade my complaint from "impossible" to merely "overly complicated for the layman".