On 06/25/10 22:48, Tom H wrote:

On Fri, Jun 25, 2010 at 2:45 PM, Miguel Medalhamiguelmedalha@sapo.pt wrote:

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I have samba installed on my server, with a fileshare. When connecting to samba, using windows, filesnames with " (double quotes) in them become gibberish on the windows client.

Since Windows doesn't allow double quotes in filenames, Samba doesn't either.

Samba can serve files with " to Linux clients. It's a Windows limitation not a Samba one.

Thanks. Well that's a bit sad really...

Glenn

Drew wrote:

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Samba can serve files with " to Linux clients. It's a Windows limitation not a Samba one.

Thanks. Well that's a bit sad really...

I don't if it's so much "sad" as a design choice for NTFS. In Windows/NTFS one can put spaces in a filename so the " is used as a delimiter of sorts on the command line to tell programs the spaces are part of the file/path name and not a separator between arguments.

I'm bound to be flogged for saying this but to be honest, I don't see any issues with having spaces in my file names. :) I'd rather have a file named "2010 Budget Proposal for CEO Review" then 2010budgetproposalforceoreview sitting in a directory somewhere.

You must be spoiled by always using GUI tools that present a pick list - no one would ever type all that crap every time they want to access a file. And, you could just as well use underscores instead of spaces and get the same visual effect AND still permit natural 'break on whitespace' command line parsing of your shell commands. I always thought Microsoft and Apple encouraged using spaces in filenames explicitly to make it difficult for people to continue using command line tools.

Drew wrote:

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You must be spoiled by always using GUI tools that present a pick list - no one would ever type all that crap every time they want to access a file. And, you could just as well use underscores instead of spaces and get the same visual effect AND still permit natural 'break on whitespace' command line parsing of your shell commands. I always thought Microsoft and Apple encouraged using spaces in filenames explicitly to make it difficult for people to continue using command line tools.

Actually ... For someone who manages Windows systems for a living I spend quite a bit of my day at the commandline. And that's why tab completion is my friend. :-)

Let's not get into the whole windows debate and "WTF is a Windows Admin doing on a Linux forum?" type of questions. :-) It's the environment I inherited, "politics," and some badly thought out projects on my predecessor's part keep Windows in the shop. I just don't tell anyone just how much linux there actually is in the shop. ;-)

Doing stuff at the windows command line tends to be different that working with unix/linux shells. Unix admins are too lazy to do interactive commands repeatedly, even with tab completion, so they will want to save any likely repeated steps as scripts with wildcard expansion to pickup the relevant filenames - or pass them as parameters if wildcards don't make sense. And they'll probably run them across many hosts with ssh. Spaces get even more ugly when you think about quoting them for multiple layers of shell processing. Not impossible, but it gets away from the normal simple elegance of shell parsing to natural words.

Ross Walker wrote:

On Jun 30, 2010, at 8:47 AM, Les Mikesell lesmikesell@gmail.com wrote:

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Drew wrote:

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You must be spoiled by always using GUI tools that present a pick list - no one would ever type all that crap every time they want to access a file. And, you could just as well use underscores instead of spaces and get the same visual effect AND still permit natural 'break on whitespace' command line parsing of your shell commands. I always thought Microsoft and Apple encouraged using spaces in filenames explicitly to make it difficult for people to continue using command line tools.

Actually ... For someone who manages Windows systems for a living I spend quite a bit of my day at the commandline. And that's why tab completion is my friend. :-)

Let's not get into the whole windows debate and "WTF is a Windows Admin doing on a Linux forum?" type of questions. :-) It's the environment I inherited, "politics," and some badly thought out projects on my predecessor's part keep Windows in the shop. I just don't tell anyone just how much linux there actually is in the shop. ;-)

Doing stuff at the windows command line tends to be different that working with unix/linux shells. Unix admins are too lazy to do interactive commands repeatedly, even with tab completion, so they will want to save any likely repeated steps as scripts with wildcard expansion to pickup the relevant filenames - or pass them as parameters if wildcards don't make sense. And they'll probably run them across many hosts with ssh. Spaces get even more ugly when you think about quoting them for multiple layers of shell processing. Not impossible, but it gets away from the normal simple elegance of shell parsing to natural words.

In my world I have two parts of the file system, one containing OS and apps that runs short-name standard and the other where the user data files are contained that uses long names and sometimes unicode names, and these can be all kinds of ugly.

These days one needs to learn to quote paths or suffer the pain...

Lots of easily-avoided choices turn out badly in the long run, don't they...

-- Les Mikesell lesmikesell@gmail.com