-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 At some point hitherto, Jerry Feldman hath spake thusly: > Especially in the Unix/Linux environment, I think that creating files or > directories with spaces is ill advised, but there is a reality. Many > Windows users are migrating to Linux, and are bringing their habits with > them. Additionally, we tend to share file systems with Windows by importing > or exporting shares, or through dual booting.
As I attempted to point out, using filenames with spaces in them on the command line is just as difficult on Windows as it is elsewhere. It's just that the average user rarely has reason to do this, thanks to the GUI. Force them to use the command line for a few weeks, and see how often they make files with spaces in their names... A place where this commonly causes difficulties, in my experience, is when one is transferring files with spaces in their names fia FTP. [I'm well aware that forcing a user to use a particular interface that does not suit them, when a different interface that does suit them is available is impractical. However, if it could be done, even voluntarily, I believe it would get the point across. This is not a practical argument. It is a contrived argument. But it makes my point.] > Also, we have Windows style file managers supplied with both GNOME > and KDE. ...which is yet another crime perpetrated by Microsoft. Due to their dominance (which as we all know, was brought about by some very sleazy business practices), the Linux community (and other software vendors too) feel(s) compelled to produce software which is broken (often litterally, though perhaps not in this case) in some or all (depending on the situation) the same ways that Windows is broken. Two wrongs still don't make a right, no matter how much market share you have. > Unfortunately, people will continue to create files and directories > with spaces. Even some of our Linux based systems, like Star Office > and Netscape will create and possibly suggest files names containing > spaces. We, as developers or systems management people need to > recognize the fact that file names will contain spaces and sometimes > non-printable characters. I agree with all that you say, but only reluctantly. Better to train users of computers not to use spaces, when they are first learning. Advice that it can and occasionally does cause problems is valid, and users who don't use them will be rewarded by not running into these problems. Though they may still see for themselves how irritating it can be when their co-workers produce files that are difficult to access because their names contain spaces. Better still, if it were that such systems did not allow spaces in their names... more on this in a moment. > I recall a system some time ago that dealt with this automatically, by > allowing the use of underscores to refer to files with embedded spaces in > the file names. I don't recall, but it may have been one of the Windows > emulator systems that used to run on Unix. So, if there was a file (or > directory in this case), My Documents, you could type My_Documents which > would refer to the same file. The only reason I didn't suggest this before is because many people actually use the underscore, and differentiate it from a space, since it's possible to do that. Now you have the problem of distinguishing between underscores that mean underscores, and underscores that are spaces. However, it's possible that some alternate scheme could be crafted. It's also possible to simply accept by convention that underscores mean spaces and will be displayed that way, even if you typed them originally. It's fine if a non-command-line user interface wants to allow the user to use spaces, but preferable if it represented them differently with some character that would not be interpreted as a shell metacharacter (or equivalent). Perhaps a translation table could be provided for files that contained spaces or other shell metacharacters, much like what is done for the ISO9660 filesystem... Personally, I wish operating systems would limit the characters that can be used in filenames to [A-Za-z0-9.:_=+-]+ or something very similar. There's no good reason why other characters NEED to be allowed, The only reason I included as much punctuation as I did is that it is, sometimes, useful to be allowed to have a handful of characters which are not alphanumeric in your filename. The few I chose are the most commonly used ones. Of course, all this is just my opinion. ;-) - -- Derek Martin [EMAIL PROTECTED] - --------------------------------------------- I prefer mail encrypted with PGP/GPG! GnuPG Key ID: 0x81CFE75D Retrieve my public key at http://pgp.mit.edu Learn more about it at http://www.gnupg.org -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.0.6 (GNU/Linux) Comment: For info see http://www.gnupg.org iD8DBQE85ZAgdjdlQoHP510RAq3KAKCuFbn3+6915dNoSwqQFYdrYxmaXACgg0Gs SBhxgNENO0F63CxinXzq3sE= =4Fd4 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- ***************************************************************** To unsubscribe from this list, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the text 'unsubscribe gnhlug' in the message body. *****************************************************************
