Spaces in filenames (was: shell script question)

[John Abreau]

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Jason Stephenson <jason at sigio.com> writes:

> By the way, it is very easy to handle spaces in file names in shell 
> scripts. Simply put double quotes (") around all variable substitutions 
> that will be used as strings. Most shells even do the right thing with 
> numeric values bracketed by double quotes.

It's also legal to have double-quotes in a filename, and your solution 
fails on such files. The fact is, a filename on Unix cannot include 
a null-byte or a "/" character. The "/" is explicitly disallowed so 
it can be used as a directory separator. No other characters are 
disallowed, because the Unix philosophy recognizes that Simple == Robust 
and Complicated == Brittle; introducing gratuitous restrictions in the 
kernel would have been pointless and would just complicate the code 
unnecessarily.

To restate my analogy a little differently, the Rules of the Road are a 
subset of the Laws of Physics. It's possible to hop in your car when 
you're stinking drunk and drive around on the roads, the sidewalks, 
and your neighbors' front lawns. Just as it's possible for a filename 
on Unix to include any eight-bit value that's not 0x0 (null) or 0x2F 
("/").
But cars don't include a device to sense when you're drunk and 
automatically kill the engine, and the lack of such a device in a car 
does not mean the car is "broken". 


- --
John Abreau / Executive Director, Boston Linux & Unix
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