On Fri, May 17, 2002 at 04:14:33PM -0400, Benjamin Scott wrote:
> On Fri, 17 May 2002, at 4:08pm, Derek D. Martin wrote:
> > Some (like me) would argue that the right way *is* to remove the spaces
> > from your filenames.
> 
>   Computers are a tool to be used by people, not the other way around.  :-)

  *sniff* ... *sniff*  ... I smell something burning.  Ah, yes, it's a
flamewar brewing!  (kidding, this one sounds like fun ;-))
  I agree with both statements above.  Finding a balance between the two
is the tough part.  The problem with spaces in filenames is that it breaks
many, many existing tools.  Worse yet is quotes in filenames. When I get
my hands on the Gnome developer decided it was okay to have a file in
the ~/.gnome-desktop directory with a single quote, I...I...I...I don't
know what I'll do, but it won't be pretty. ;-)
  Unless we plan to overhaul all existing command line shells, then any
use of spaces should only be as additional 'handles' or some such that
are only used by the GUI.  In other words, NOT filenames, but possibly
some special filetype that stores a file handle that possibly has spaces.
  Another example is Red Hat's decision to 'fix' the sorting of filenames
by the ls and other commands to use the LANG and/or the LC_COLLATE variables
so that LANG=en_US sorts alphabetically instead of lexically.  From the
point of view that computers are a tool used by people, this was the correct
thing to do.  Do we adhere to 30 years of Unix tradition or centuries of
human tradition?  I personally hate not having things sorted lexically.
It broke a *number* of my scripts.  And it breaks the Unix tradition of
naming files in ALL UPPERCASE so that they appear first in the file listing.
Thankfully, it's an option that can easily be reverted to old behavior to
stop things from breaking, even for just the duration of a script's running
(by placing the appropriate LANG or LC_COLLATE setting at the top).
  Dealing with spaces (or, as I said, even worse, quotes) in filenames is
much more of a pain in the a** to deal with.  Switching back and forth
between different values for IFS (which is probably what one would need
to do in the majority of scripts) is likely to be a lot more error prone.
  [Now I'm going to go see if I can go hack the ext2/ext3 source code
to disallow spaces and other special characters...*evil grin*...man I
love Free Software.]

-- 
-Paul Iadonisi
 Senior System Administrator
 Red Hat Certified Engineer / Local Linux Lobbyist
 Ever see a penguin fly?  --  Try Linux.
 GPL all the way: Sell services, don't lease secrets

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