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