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... -Ross