4 ms·

Handling of special character is usually a bigger problem than unicode. Just today, I tried to name a file with both a single quote and an exclamation point fro

• qb45 14y ago
  mv foo \!\'
  • pyre 14y ago
    Better: $ touch 'j-kidd'\''s file!' $ ll 'j-kidd'\''s file!' -rw-rw-r-- 1 uid gid 0 Apr 11 13:30 j-kidd's file! History expansion will happen on the ! in double quotes: $ ls "!$" ls "'j-kidd'\''s file!'" ls: cannot access 'j-kidd'\''s file!': No such file or directory It won't happen on single-quotes: $ ls '!$' ls: cannot access !$: No such file or directory The only issue is that you can't escape a single-quote within single quotes, so you have to do one of these '\'' (escape a single-quote block, a literal single quote, start a new single quote block).
    • qb45 14y ago
      Yep, that's an important and maybe non-obvious behavior of the shell: "directly adjacent strings which are double quoted, "'single quoted or even'\ unquoted\ and\ possibly\ full\ of\ escape\ sequences\ 'get concatenated and count as a single parameter.' Running touch on the above will create one file with very long name.
• kzrdude 14y ago
  I was going to question you about that, but then I realized I, too, want computers to handle natural language filenames. Or, "don't be your computer's tool!" -- the operator should accept no arbitrary limitations.
• btilly 14y ago
  I usually wind up calling Perl for that kind of stuff. That also lets you write confusing filenames like "foo\rbar". Which can be really irritating to figure out without a GUI.