4 ms·

I firmly agree that control characters, including tab and newline, should have been shown the door decades ago. All they do is make problems. But spaces in fil

I firmly agree that control characters, including tab and newline, should have been shown the door decades ago. All they do is make problems. But spaces in filenames are really just an inconvenience at most for heavy terminal users, and are a natural thing to use for basically everyone else. All my markdown files are word-word-word.md, but all my WYSIWIG documents are "Word word word.doc". The hassle of constantly explaining to angry civilians "why won't it let me write this file" would be worse than the hassle of having to quote or backslash-escape the occasional path in the shell.

skissane 3y ago
Spaces in file names are the cause of countless bugs in shell scripts, even C code which uses APIs like system() or popen(). Yes, solutions exist to those issues, but many people forget, and they add complexity which otherwise might not be necessary. For non-technical WYSIWYG users, there is a simple solution: auto-replace space with underscore when user enters a filename containing it; you could even convert the underscore back to a space on display. Some GUIs already do stuff like this anyway - e.g. macOS exchanging slash and colon in its GUI layer (primarily for backward compatibility with Classic MacOS where slash not colon was the path separator.)
- eviks 3y ago
  If you have the power of a wish, why do you wish to make the world worse without such a common thing like spaces instead of wishing for the legacy APIs to have a better solution?
  - skissane 3y ago
    Why wish the world to be more complicated by insisting a character do double duty both as a valid character in file names and also a delimiter in lists of file names, such as commonly occur in command line arguments? By allowing a character to do double duty in that way, you make necessary all the complexity of quoting/escaping. If the set of file name characters, and the set of file name delimiters, are orthogonal, you reduce (possibly even eliminate) the need for that complexity. Also, allowing space in filenames creates other difficulties, such as file names with trailing spaces, double spaces, etc, which might not be noticed, even two files whose names differ only in the number of spaces. A character like underscore does not have the same problem, since a trailing underscore or a double underscore is more readily recognised than a trailing or double space.
    - eviks 3y ago
      Because the land of cli args is inconsequential compared in scale compared to the general world of computer use (so it's better to wish for a tiny segment to have better design), and banning spaces does not remove the complexity of escaping (how do you escape _?) Your trailing/double space issue is also easy to solve (in the world of wishes) with highlighting or other mechanisms, so making the world much worse by banning spaces is not the appropriate remedy
      - samatman 3y ago
        I've never used a filesystem which doesn't remove trailing spaces from file names. Try it.
        skissane 3y ago
        I’ve never seen a filesystem which removes trailing spaces from file names. I take it you are talking about GUIs which do that, not filesystems.
      - skissane 3y ago
        > Because the land of cli args is inconsequential compared in scale compared to the general world of computer use Not really true - the “general world of computer use” uses that stuff very heavily, just “behind the scenes” so the average user isn’t aware of it. For example, it is very common for GUI apps to parse command line arguments at startup (since, e.g., one way the OS, and other apps which integrate with it, uses to get your word processor to open a particular document, is to pass the path to the document as a command line argument) > and banning spaces does not remove the complexity of escaping (how do you escape _?) You don’t need to escape _ unless it has some special meaning to the command processor/shell. On Unix it doesn’t. Nor for Windows cmd.exe
        eviks 3y ago
        > just “behind the scenes” That means they're not using it since they don't have to deal with spaces as spaces vs as separators > You don’t need to escape So how do you differentiate between a user inserting a space and a user inserting a literal _ in a file name?

skissane 3y ago

Spaces in file names are the cause of countless bugs in shell scripts, even C code which uses APIs like system() or popen(). Yes, solutions exist to those issues, but many people forget, and they add complexity which otherwise might not be necessary. For non-technical WYSIWYG users, there is a simple solution: auto-replace space with underscore when user enters a filename containing it; you could even convert the underscore back to a space on display. Some GUIs already do stuff like this anyway - e.g. macOS exchanging slash and colon in its GUI layer (primarily for backward compatibility with Classic MacOS where slash not colon was the path separator.)

eviks 3y ago
If you have the power of a wish, why do you wish to make the world worse without such a common thing like spaces instead of wishing for the legacy APIs to have a better solution?
- skissane 3y ago
  Why wish the world to be more complicated by insisting a character do double duty both as a valid character in file names and also a delimiter in lists of file names, such as commonly occur in command line arguments? By allowing a character to do double duty in that way, you make necessary all the complexity of quoting/escaping. If the set of file name characters, and the set of file name delimiters, are orthogonal, you reduce (possibly even eliminate) the need for that complexity. Also, allowing space in filenames creates other difficulties, such as file names with trailing spaces, double spaces, etc, which might not be noticed, even two files whose names differ only in the number of spaces. A character like underscore does not have the same problem, since a trailing underscore or a double underscore is more readily recognised than a trailing or double space.
  - eviks 3y ago
    Because the land of cli args is inconsequential compared in scale compared to the general world of computer use (so it's better to wish for a tiny segment to have better design), and banning spaces does not remove the complexity of escaping (how do you escape _?) Your trailing/double space issue is also easy to solve (in the world of wishes) with highlighting or other mechanisms, so making the world much worse by banning spaces is not the appropriate remedy
    - samatman 3y ago
      I've never used a filesystem which doesn't remove trailing spaces from file names. Try it.
      - skissane 3y ago
        I’ve never seen a filesystem which removes trailing spaces from file names. I take it you are talking about GUIs which do that, not filesystems.
    - skissane 3y ago
      > Because the land of cli args is inconsequential compared in scale compared to the general world of computer use Not really true - the “general world of computer use” uses that stuff very heavily, just “behind the scenes” so the average user isn’t aware of it. For example, it is very common for GUI apps to parse command line arguments at startup (since, e.g., one way the OS, and other apps which integrate with it, uses to get your word processor to open a particular document, is to pass the path to the document as a command line argument) > and banning spaces does not remove the complexity of escaping (how do you escape _?) You don’t need to escape _ unless it has some special meaning to the command processor/shell. On Unix it doesn’t. Nor for Windows cmd.exe
      - eviks 3y ago
        > just “behind the scenes” That means they're not using it since they don't have to deal with spaces as spaces vs as separators > You don’t need to escape So how do you differentiate between a user inserting a space and a user inserting a literal _ in a file name?