Re: Spaces in file and directory names.

[Sam Vilain <sam hydro gen nz>]

"Brandon S. Allbery" <allbery@hilfy.ece.cmu.edu> writes:

> Those of us who use command lines by and large understand the concept of 
> quoting, so such names are not much of a hardship.  Moreover, bash understands 
> quoting as well (although ksh doesn't, so care may be required on non-Linux 
> systems) so you can even use completion.

(Sorry to regurgitate this old thread)

I think that care should be taken in *all* programs to support *all*
characters in filenames.  For those who don't realise, under most, if
not all unixes it is possible to create files with arbitrary wierd
characters (anything except nulls and "/"'s) in them:

$ echo foo > 'foo
bar'
$ ls -b foo*
foo\nbar

This will break tab completion in all versions of bash up to 2.01.
Older ls commands (eg SunOS 4) display this as "foo?bar".  Most ls
commands make it look like two seperate files.  Gnome dialogues should
display it with the ambiguity it 'deserves'.

Also, if we ever port to the Mac, that filesystem even supports "/"
characters in filenames, from what I've heard.  Maybe we don't care
about that.

Every gnome program should at least be able to manipulate files with
wierd characters in them without breaking.  Perhaps we should even be
able to create files with these names using the gnome stock dialogues,
but if so it should elicit a warning ;-)

-- 
Sam Vilain, sam@whoever.com         work: sam.vilain@unisys.com
http://www.hydro.gen.nz                home: sam@hydro.gen.nz