[CentOS] Samba and " (and maybe other characters) in paths/files

[Les Mikesell]

Ross Walker wrote:
> On Jun 30, 2010, at 8:47 AM, Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> Drew wrote:
>>>> 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 at gmail.com