Luis EG Ontanon wrote:
in *NIX filenames with spaces are particularly tedious... I
personally would forbid spaces in filenames en-toto as they tend to
make scripts fail...
Well, insufficiently-carefully-written scripts, anyway.
$ echo a b > a\ b
$ echo c d > c\ d
$ find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 grep a /dev/null
./a b:a b
I don't know whether all systems have the "-print0" flag to find (makes
it terminate the file names it prints with a null byte rather than with
a newline) and the "-0" flag to xargs (makes it expect file names
terminated with a null byte), but that handles file names with spaces in
them - and also handles a resulting file list bigger than the maximum
number of arguments that can be passed in an exec call. (The /dev/null
also makes sure there are at least two arguments to grep, so it always
reports the file name.)
This is also a potential issue on Windows, if, for example, you're using
a UN*X shell (I don't know whether you have to be careful when writing
.bat files to make sure *they* handle file names with spaces in them).
Yes, file names with spaces are a bit more inconvenient to use from
command lines (UN*X or Windows), but command-line support has gotten
better over time (file name completion handles it in bash and the
version of ksh in Leopard, at least, and options such as -print0 to find
have shown up over time), and they aren't particularly inconvenient from
a GUI. We might still want to, e.g. replace them with underscores, or
have an option to allow them to be replaced with underscores.
