It’s also really good practice to account for weird characters in programs and shell scripts you write because then you don’t have injection vulnerabilities or unicode problems.
Seriously, what’s an example of spaces in filenames causing a problem?
Will error for example. It works fine for filenames without space, but if the filename has space in it, it will be interpreted wrong. But if your testing batch doesn’t have spaces in the filename, you won’t see the issue until it’s used on a file that does.
Note ‘cat’ is a placeholder, any function/script that can be used on a file here will have the same issue.
Something similar to that caught me last week while I was unzipping multiple mods in bulk for a game.
The point I guess I was getting at was that even having “come up” with Slackware and a whole os that’s just 69 half baked scripts in a trenchcoat I adopted a more universal mindset and specific skill set when using scripts over ten years ago and find it hard to justify expecting sanitary inputs nowadays when it is harder and harder with Unicode and is a serious security threat to treat variables as passable strings.
I wasn’t trying to suggest that there isn’t a way to make a space in a filename cause an error, but that I can’t think of an example where allowing a space to affect things was a good or right way to do something.
In the specific example of the op, no spaces is a scene rule from the days of ftp and irc/usenet. The idea behind having only a subset of the ascii character set was to allow those services to work with the files and commands around them. There’s no reason to treat my own scripts and programs as if they’ll never encounter the galaxy of other characters that are flying around now and to be honest, theres no reason not to work in sane handling of non ascii characters in filenames even for code I only expect to touch scene stuff.
It used to be an unavoidable mistake when we dug up buried utilities. Now that there’s a number to call first it’s only the fault of the knucklehead with the shovel.
Please don’t read this as some kind of an argument. I think we basically agree and I’m not trying to get one over on you.
Have you ever written a program or simply used a terminal?
Escape characters and autocomplete exist.
It’s also really good practice to account for weird characters in programs and shell scripts you write because then you don’t have injection vulnerabilities or unicode problems.
Seriously, what’s an example of spaces in filenames causing a problem?
for f in *.txt; do cat $f; doneWill error for example. It works fine for filenames without space, but if the filename has space in it, it will be interpreted wrong. But if your testing batch doesn’t have spaces in the filename, you won’t see the issue until it’s used on a file that does. Note ‘cat’ is a placeholder, any function/script that can be used on a file here will have the same issue.
Something similar to that caught me last week while I was unzipping multiple mods in bulk for a game.
I’m not at a bash terminal, but I think “$f” fixes that. I’ll look tonight.
You are correct, that is how I worked around the issue and why I mentioned that work around in my original post
I didn’t notice that part of your post. 🙏
The point I guess I was getting at was that even having “come up” with Slackware and a whole os that’s just 69 half baked scripts in a trenchcoat I adopted a more universal mindset and specific skill set when using scripts over ten years ago and find it hard to justify expecting sanitary inputs nowadays when it is harder and harder with Unicode and is a serious security threat to treat variables as passable strings.
I wasn’t trying to suggest that there isn’t a way to make a space in a filename cause an error, but that I can’t think of an example where allowing a space to affect things was a good or right way to do something.
In the specific example of the op, no spaces is a scene rule from the days of ftp and irc/usenet. The idea behind having only a subset of the ascii character set was to allow those services to work with the files and commands around them. There’s no reason to treat my own scripts and programs as if they’ll never encounter the galaxy of other characters that are flying around now and to be honest, theres no reason not to work in sane handling of non ascii characters in filenames even for code I only expect to touch scene stuff.
It used to be an unavoidable mistake when we dug up buried utilities. Now that there’s a number to call first it’s only the fault of the knucklehead with the shovel.
Please don’t read this as some kind of an argument. I think we basically agree and I’m not trying to get one over on you.