6 ms·

But spaces are allowed in filenames since 80s, didn't software had enough time to adapt?

michaelt 2y ago
Microsoft's Windows 95 put spaces into "c:\My Documents" and "c:\Program Files" so that developers targeting Windows were forced to support spaces in filenames. Of course, in those days if an OS upgrade broke some third party software, the end user paid for an upgrade. So although Microsoft forced developers' hands, the developers all got paid for their trouble. And you'd only have your hand forced that way once or twice a decade. Windows at the time was also all about the GUI file-pickers. Breaking the command line? Shell scripts? What are those?
- toast0 2y ago
  And now it's \Users, presumably because after 20 years, Microsoft gave up?
  - hwc 2y ago
    Or someone got tired of typing long paths.
  - Uvix 2y ago
    They changed from \Documents and Settings to \Users in Vista, alongside other profile rejiggering (e.g. introducing AppData folders). By that point software had either been fixed or would never be fixed, so keeping a space in the name wasn't particularly useful.
  - rcxdude 2y ago
    It's still very common for usernames to have spaces, though.
  - alterom 2y ago
    And now it's \Users, presumably because after 20 years, Microsoft gave up? Only if you assume that people rarely have spaces in their Windows login names (e.g. "Joe Smith"). Either that, or Windows users have learned to not be scared of spaces in filenames, usernames, and their own literal names.
    - numpad0 2y ago
      Windows set up with Microsoft Account uses abbreviated e-mail for user names, because UTF-8 breaks apps, including many East Asian apps. non-Western Windows users always knew never to use anything outside ASCII for usernames, passwords, or any programmatically used identifiers. It's English users that haven't learned it.
      - alterom 2y ago
        Sure, but space is an ASCII character.
  - throw16180339 2y ago
    IIRC, they changed it to get more value out of the 260 character MAX_PATH. I know there was some sort of manifest to enable longer paths, but I'm not sure what the current status is.
    - LegionMammal978 2y ago
      The status quo is that officially, you still have to both set a registry key (or equivalently, set an option in the Group Policy Editor) and add an element to each application manifest. The official workaround at runtime is to use the "\\?\" prefix with an absolute path to create an unrestricted verbatim pathname. For instance, the fs::canonicalize() function in Rust will always return such a pathname, to many programmers' dismay, since outside tools often choke on them. The unofficial workaround is to set the undocumented IsLongPathAwareProcess bit in the process's PEB. The Go runtime does this, but silently falls back to "\\?\" prefixes if the Windows version is too old. (Note that in general, canonicalizing paths is safer on Windows than on Unix-like systems, since open directories cannot be renamed.)
  - 3eb7988a1663 2y ago
    OneDrive breaks that convention. Last two companies I was at, the corporate location was something like "$HOME/OneDrive - $COMPANY". That the two companies had the same format tells me it is a default and/or suggested practice for some reason.
- bigstrat2003 2y ago
  That doesn't sound right. Microsoft is obsessed with backwards compatibility, going so far as to accommodate programs that were writing to Windows' private memory just to preserve it. Deliberately breaking programs isn't in their ethos at all.
  - sltkr 2y ago
    The new filesystem APIs were introduced with Windows 95, so there was no backward compatibility to break. New programs using those new APIs were forced to support spaces in directories. Using spaces in the system directories forced application developers to consider that scenario and deal with it appropriately. Meanwhile, DOS and Windows 3.1 applications that did run on Windows 95 could access files under a backward compatible 8.3 scheme, like C:\Progra~1\ instead of "C:\Program Files".
    - bigstrat2003 2y ago
      That's a good point, thanks for pointing it out.
  - michaelt 2y ago
    I'm thinking of the transitions from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95 (IIRC introducing 32-bit and filenames longer than 8 characters) and the transition from Windows 95 to Windows XP (IIRC introducing a proper permission system, thus breaking anything that relied on being able to write things outside of user-owned folders) I agree they were famously accommodating in those days. But they also had enough market power that if they said users could only write to one folder and it had a space in the filename, developers who disliked it couldn't vote with their feet.
  - lousken 2y ago
    And yet... if you create user using a display name e.g. Peter Čenička in AAD and deploy a PC with intune you will get home folder called PeterČenička.[0] It breaks SO MANY things. And no, that beta UTF8 system wide setting does not work with 3rd party apps. I just dont understand why they dont use part of the email address as the home folder name. And just because of this stupidity, user display names have to be without any of these characters Microsoft ... PLEASE [0] https://doitpshway.com/do-not-use-diacritics-in-aad-user-displayname https://doitpshway.com/do-not-use-diacritics-in-aad-user-dis...
- dizhn 2y ago
  A lot of software still had issues and asked the user to use C:\Directory directly. Some probably still do.
  - reginald78 2y ago
    I remember trying to install Visual Studio in the mid-late 2000s (when SSDs make hard drive space small again) to a directory other than C: and found that after following a rather convoluted process you could only actually move maybe 20% of the install files off C:.
    - StefanBatory 2y ago
      It is still the same. :(
  - yonatan8070 2y ago
    I've seen some things installing directly into C:\, NVIDIA's software jumps to mind
- akira2501 2y ago
  C:\Progra~1 They didn't force anything.
  - moritzwarhier 2y ago
    Did they intentionally use only folder names with spaces that are at least 9 characters long and with the space after the first 6, so that the 8.3 version contains no spaces? Pretty clever if so :D
    - volemo 2y ago
      What ‘bout “C:\My Documents” though?
      - cobbaut 2y ago
        That came later, end of 1996 with OSR2.
    - repiret 2y ago
      A space in an otherwise 8.3 file name would still be treated as a long file name and get a ~1 shot name alias.
      - moritzwarhier 2y ago
        Thanks for the clarification! I was curious about a deep dive into this topic, and skimmed the MS doc pages after a Google search. They mentioned different Windows APIs and Long file names, but the only mention of the tilde compat layer I found was very superficial ("some file-systems" use the tilde as special character), so I abandoned my initial interest in getting up to speed on this during a 2min weeekend read.
deltarholamda 2y ago
My last name has an apostrophe in it. This isn't super weird or anything, there have been "O'Haras" and "O'Neills" (with 2 Ls) forever. And yet whenever I deal with a computer system I don't put the apostrophe in because even in 2024 it is completely jacked up. Sometimes it's just disallowed. Sometimes I get "\\'" showing up. Sometimes I get "'". I've seen "’". One time, one system accepted it, but another system that accessed the same data didn't allow apostrophes so the person using the second system couldn't access the record, and it took 2 phone calls and 3 people to come up with a workaround. It doesn't work often enough that I don't even try anymore. There are just too many opportunities for it to get forgotten or handled improperly from all directions.
- soneil 2y ago
  I had fun in the vmware-broadcom transition because the broadcom portal doesn't allow that, but the vmware portal did. Not even in my username, just in the surname field. The new portal ate it on that so hard, I wasn't even allowed to create a ticket to do anything about it. Not as bad as when I was once issued a first.o'last@corp email address though ..
  - mixmastamyk 2y ago
    There may be a Unicode character that looks like apostrophe but has no quoting semantics. I use an arrow instead of greater-than symbol in my prompt for the same reason. To avoid copy/paste issues.
    - jcranmer 2y ago
      Non-ASCII characters in email addresses have even worse compatibility issues than punctuation characters. Punctuation fails because people don't know the standard. Non-ASCII fails because people don't know the latest standard.
  - deltarholamda 2y ago
    >Not as bad as when I was once issued a first.o'last@corp email address though Oh, man, that happened to me too, way back in the late 90s. I had forgotten about that. It broke things all over the place. Even now you run into the occasional validator that is convinced that the plus sign is not valid in email addresses.
wongarsu 2y ago
NPX on windows was broken for years when your username had a space in it. Never underestimate how long bugs can stay around when it doesn't affect any of the developers and for everyone else the workaround is quicker than fixing it
slightwinder 2y ago
Problem is, the design of Unix shells is older, and they have some parts which automatically split on space if not handled carefully. This is really annoying.

Microsoft's Windows 95 put spaces into "c:\My Documents" and "c:\Program Files" so that developers targeting Windows were forced to support spaces in filenames. Of course, in those days if an OS upgrade broke some third party software, the end user paid for an upgrade. So although Microsoft forced developers' hands, the developers all got paid for their trouble. And you'd only have your hand forced that way once or twice a decade. Windows at the time was also all about the GUI file-pickers. Breaking the command line? Shell scripts? What are those?

toast0 2y ago
And now it's \Users, presumably because after 20 years, Microsoft gave up?
- hwc 2y ago
  Or someone got tired of typing long paths.
- Uvix 2y ago
  They changed from \Documents and Settings to \Users in Vista, alongside other profile rejiggering (e.g. introducing AppData folders). By that point software had either been fixed or would never be fixed, so keeping a space in the name wasn't particularly useful.
- rcxdude 2y ago
  It's still very common for usernames to have spaces, though.
- alterom 2y ago
  And now it's \Users, presumably because after 20 years, Microsoft gave up? Only if you assume that people rarely have spaces in their Windows login names (e.g. "Joe Smith"). Either that, or Windows users have learned to not be scared of spaces in filenames, usernames, and their own literal names.
  - numpad0 2y ago
    Windows set up with Microsoft Account uses abbreviated e-mail for user names, because UTF-8 breaks apps, including many East Asian apps. non-Western Windows users always knew never to use anything outside ASCII for usernames, passwords, or any programmatically used identifiers. It's English users that haven't learned it.
    - alterom 2y ago
      Sure, but space is an ASCII character.
- throw16180339 2y ago
  IIRC, they changed it to get more value out of the 260 character MAX_PATH. I know there was some sort of manifest to enable longer paths, but I'm not sure what the current status is.
  - LegionMammal978 2y ago
    The status quo is that officially, you still have to both set a registry key (or equivalently, set an option in the Group Policy Editor) and add an element to each application manifest. The official workaround at runtime is to use the "\\?\" prefix with an absolute path to create an unrestricted verbatim pathname. For instance, the fs::canonicalize() function in Rust will always return such a pathname, to many programmers' dismay, since outside tools often choke on them. The unofficial workaround is to set the undocumented IsLongPathAwareProcess bit in the process's PEB. The Go runtime does this, but silently falls back to "\\?\" prefixes if the Windows version is too old. (Note that in general, canonicalizing paths is safer on Windows than on Unix-like systems, since open directories cannot be renamed.)
- 3eb7988a1663 2y ago
  OneDrive breaks that convention. Last two companies I was at, the corporate location was something like "$HOME/OneDrive - $COMPANY". That the two companies had the same format tells me it is a default and/or suggested practice for some reason.
bigstrat2003 2y ago
That doesn't sound right. Microsoft is obsessed with backwards compatibility, going so far as to accommodate programs that were writing to Windows' private memory just to preserve it. Deliberately breaking programs isn't in their ethos at all.
- sltkr 2y ago
  The new filesystem APIs were introduced with Windows 95, so there was no backward compatibility to break. New programs using those new APIs were forced to support spaces in directories. Using spaces in the system directories forced application developers to consider that scenario and deal with it appropriately. Meanwhile, DOS and Windows 3.1 applications that did run on Windows 95 could access files under a backward compatible 8.3 scheme, like C:\Progra~1\ instead of "C:\Program Files".
  - bigstrat2003 2y ago
    That's a good point, thanks for pointing it out.
- michaelt 2y ago
  I'm thinking of the transitions from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95 (IIRC introducing 32-bit and filenames longer than 8 characters) and the transition from Windows 95 to Windows XP (IIRC introducing a proper permission system, thus breaking anything that relied on being able to write things outside of user-owned folders) I agree they were famously accommodating in those days. But they also had enough market power that if they said users could only write to one folder and it had a space in the filename, developers who disliked it couldn't vote with their feet.
- lousken 2y ago
  And yet... if you create user using a display name e.g. Peter Čenička in AAD and deploy a PC with intune you will get home folder called PeterČenička.[0] It breaks SO MANY things. And no, that beta UTF8 system wide setting does not work with 3rd party apps. I just dont understand why they dont use part of the email address as the home folder name. And just because of this stupidity, user display names have to be without any of these characters Microsoft ... PLEASE [0] https://doitpshway.com/do-not-use-diacritics-in-aad-user-displayname https://doitpshway.com/do-not-use-diacritics-in-aad-user-dis...
dizhn 2y ago
A lot of software still had issues and asked the user to use C:\Directory directly. Some probably still do.
- reginald78 2y ago
  I remember trying to install Visual Studio in the mid-late 2000s (when SSDs make hard drive space small again) to a directory other than C: and found that after following a rather convoluted process you could only actually move maybe 20% of the install files off C:.
  - StefanBatory 2y ago
    It is still the same. :(
- yonatan8070 2y ago
  I've seen some things installing directly into C:\, NVIDIA's software jumps to mind
akira2501 2y ago
C:\Progra~1 They didn't force anything.
- moritzwarhier 2y ago
  Did they intentionally use only folder names with spaces that are at least 9 characters long and with the space after the first 6, so that the 8.3 version contains no spaces? Pretty clever if so :D
  - volemo 2y ago
    What ‘bout “C:\My Documents” though?
    - cobbaut 2y ago
      That came later, end of 1996 with OSR2.
  - repiret 2y ago
    A space in an otherwise 8.3 file name would still be treated as a long file name and get a ~1 shot name alias.
    - moritzwarhier 2y ago
      Thanks for the clarification! I was curious about a deep dive into this topic, and skimmed the MS doc pages after a Google search. They mentioned different Windows APIs and Long file names, but the only mention of the tilde compat layer I found was very superficial ("some file-systems" use the tilde as special character), so I abandoned my initial interest in getting up to speed on this during a 2min weeekend read.

deltarholamda 2y ago

My last name has an apostrophe in it. This isn't super weird or anything, there have been "O'Haras" and "O'Neills" (with 2 Ls) forever. And yet whenever I deal with a computer system I don't put the apostrophe in because even in 2024 it is completely jacked up. Sometimes it's just disallowed. Sometimes I get "\\'" showing up. Sometimes I get "'". I've seen "’". One time, one system accepted it, but another system that accessed the same data didn't allow apostrophes so the person using the second system couldn't access the record, and it took 2 phone calls and 3 people to come up with a workaround. It doesn't work often enough that I don't even try anymore. There are just too many opportunities for it to get forgotten or handled improperly from all directions.

soneil 2y ago
I had fun in the vmware-broadcom transition because the broadcom portal doesn't allow that, but the vmware portal did. Not even in my username, just in the surname field. The new portal ate it on that so hard, I wasn't even allowed to create a ticket to do anything about it. Not as bad as when I was once issued a first.o'last@corp email address though ..
- mixmastamyk 2y ago
  There may be a Unicode character that looks like apostrophe but has no quoting semantics. I use an arrow instead of greater-than symbol in my prompt for the same reason. To avoid copy/paste issues.
  - jcranmer 2y ago
    Non-ASCII characters in email addresses have even worse compatibility issues than punctuation characters. Punctuation fails because people don't know the standard. Non-ASCII fails because people don't know the latest standard.
- deltarholamda 2y ago
  >Not as bad as when I was once issued a first.o'last@corp email address though Oh, man, that happened to me too, way back in the late 90s. I had forgotten about that. It broke things all over the place. Even now you run into the occasional validator that is convinced that the plus sign is not valid in email addresses.

wongarsu 2y ago

NPX on windows was broken for years when your username had a space in it. Never underestimate how long bugs can stay around when it doesn't affect any of the developers and for everyone else the workaround is quicker than fixing it

slightwinder 2y ago

Problem is, the design of Unix shells is older, and they have some parts which automatically split on space if not handled carefully. This is really annoying.