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.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell at gmail.com