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Whitespace in filenames in general is difficult to deal with. Many, maybe most, programs get it wrong. It's not just about shell scripts, many GUI programs fail

Whitespace in filenames in general is difficult to deal with. Many, maybe most, programs get it wrong. It's not just about shell scripts, many GUI programs fail to handle those files properly too.

alexvitkov 2y ago
When GUI programs mishandle filenames with spaces, IME it's usually because they spawn a subshell in a naive way (system("rm " + filename)). To mishandle spaces you have to split an input w/ filenames by whitespace, which is not that common of an operation outside of a shell.
- InfiniteRand 2y ago
  My favorite file+space issues is spaces at the end of file names, especially when you copy and paste text, or text gets trimmed from an input box, or the person forgets to trim space from an input box...
nradov 2y ago
The vast majority of Windows and MacOS programs get it right.
- consteval 2y ago
  No, no they don't - you just don't notice when they get it wrong, and you also don't name your files stupid things (I imagine). If you actually test this, you'll realize a ton of Windows programs get it wrong. Also, in general this is a poor argument. The goal of Linux isn't to be as much like Windows as possible, because Windows sucks ass. Nobody in their right mind would use Linux if it was just Windows but, presumably, shittier. The entire appeal of Linux is that it isn't Windows, and it isn't MacOS.
arp242 2y ago
Eh? It's really not a bother in pretty much any programming language, and you don't really need to do anything special for it. I don't know any program that has any problems with it. Even zsh has fixed this. It's just /bin/sh and bash that are annoying.