You must log in or # to comment.
Can’t relate. I use shell all the time, and I always use spaces in file paths, especially to make sure scripts I make still work then
i y’all just started using fish shell, you’d have proper shell completions and argument splitting that doesn’t care about spaces in file names
I very intentionally have all my code in
Personal Projects 🥰andWork Projects 🏦directories so I can find bugs in the handling of file paths.My work has me working with Matlab Simulink paths, which may (and sometimes actually do) contain newlines.
not sure why the default behavior is this:
file\ name\ with\ a\ bunch\ of\ spacesinstead of this:
"file name with a bunch of spaces"but you can just press
"before pressing tab to auto-complete, and it will use the 2nd formBecause quoting requires token expansion (e.g. ~ to /home/you). Escaping gives you a much shorter path in that case.
That said I’m with you, full quoted paths read better to me.
I\ don\'t\ know\ what\ you\ mean,\ I\'ve\ never\ encountered\ any\ annoyances.
'I don\'t know what you mean, I\‘ve never encountered any annoyances.’
Single quotes don’t allow any escaping in shell, you need
'I don'\''t know what you mean, I'\''ve never encountered any annoyances'Or, in Zsh with
setopt rcquotes:'I don''t know what you mean, I''ve never encountered any annoyances'it works in fish
Oh right, good catch. That’s me shell scripting while in a meeting. 🫠
Good use of a meeting to be fair
Microsoft intentionally made programs install to C:\Program Files on Windows 95+ to force programmers to deal with spaces in filenames.
Someone make one of those “statements made by the utterly deranged” memes about it, please and thank you.
what is even more funny about this is that the name of that directory used to be locale-dependent, so in sweden it was just called “Program”, completely nullifying that idea.
C:\Program Files
C:\Program Files (x86)
C:\ProgramData
C:\PROGRA~1
The fucking parenthetical x86 absolutely kills me. I don’t normally wish dick cancer on people,
It’s only localised in the file explorer. The actual folder name is always Program Files.
Only since vista, it used to be localized.
what about placeholders/variables like %localappdata%, %windir%, %programfiles%?
I can only assume these always existed, otherwise it would have been a nightmare for everyone.
Excel used to have, and I think it still has, localised function names.
Makes it a nightmare to look up stuff on the Internet.
Still does. Commas or semicolons as separators in functions differ at least. It fucking sucks.
the entirety of office has localised hotkeys. whaddayamean ^F is “search”? it’s for fat text!
nope, that’s an NT thing
Really? That is absolute insanity
No this is just clever
Given even what little I know of their history and what they are doing now, I cannot be sure this wasn’t the intention at least partially
at least you/arent/using\ linux
I’ve recently learned that in Linux, you can use emois in filenames. I died a
littlelot inside when I learned that.On Linux file systems you can use any character except NULL, and / is a reserved character.
E.g. on ext-4 “All characters and character sequences permitted, except for NULL (‘\0’), ‘/’, and the special file names “.” and “…” which are reserved for indicating (respectively) current and parent directories.”
I once accidentally created a file with a newline character in it… it was pretty tricky to fix from command line.
Arrest this person
This is absolutely haram
it was on accident, habibi, I swear 😁. I messed up some cmake code for preprocessing .txt ascii sprites into constants and accidentally created this abomination
I once made a script to delete .o, .lib, and .so files from my huge dev folder to free up space on my home partition.
It did not go as planned.
O no, o no no no
This is why you shouldn’t parse
lsoutput btw. Usefindandreadinstead
I actually did this a lot on classic Mac OS. Intentionally.
The reason was that you could put a carriage return as the first character of a file, and it would sort above everything else by name while otherwise being invisible. You just had to copy the carriage return from a text editor and then paste it into the rename field in the Finder.
Since OS X / macOS can still read classic Mac HFS+ volumes, you can indeed still have carriage returns in file names on modern Macs. I don’t think you can create them on modern macOS, though. At least not in the Finder or with common Terminal commands.
I created a file with backspace in name, it was hard to understand why filename doesn’t match
I don’t conduct interviews very often, but when I do, one of my questions is always about interacting with files that have special characters in the filename.
Did you not just use tab? That’s the usual method of dealing with weird characters in filenames that I’ve found
This was quite a while ago now, but I don’t think my shell escaped the tab complete properly, I remember it just printing a literal newline and evaluating it as a second command. I think there was other unicode in there too, otherwise I would have just typed it out. I had to do something with null terminated output and piping it in to
mv, but I can’t remember what exactly.Too bad when there’s multiple files starting with and consisting mostly of e.g. kanji (when on a Latin keyboard).
With the right shell, you can just press tab multiple times to cycle through the possible completions.
So … is allowed, or all whitespace, or Zalgo text.
I mean, on the one hand, I guess why be restrictive, but on the other I feel like requiring something that looks like language somehow might be a good idea to avoid edge cases and attacks.
You can have new lines in your file names. YSAP has a good video/playlist about how to deal with these and many more.
could you have
..? I assume most terminals would just spell out.\x200b.?Or use a hair space so it looks almost the same. Or … but you’ve added the right-to-left unicode character. I’m guessing there’s something that looks a lot like a period, too.
If ext4 doesn’t include restrictions terminals probably should.
In filenames? AMATEURS! Use obscure Unicode in your passphrases for maximum security. Ctrl-Shift-U, enter arbitrary code point, bam! 🦊 Works even better with a Compose key and a nice, chonky
.XComposefile to throw some gr∑∑k letters around, for instance, like some confused script kiddie. :)On topic: There are multiple variants of spaces in Unicode. You’re welcome, and now go and create something utterly deranged with that information.
I already deal far too much with trying to handle dumb fucking typos in employee data, and trying to turn human names into valid email addresses.
The first time I encounter something like this there will be a body. It will not be found.
иnteresting_idéa_lål.ㅅㅇ
This needs more upvotes. Chaos gods smile at you, and I thank you
unix filenames are just string of bytes, the operating system does not interpret it in anyway. this is a much saner approach compared to Windows where language settings can change file system behavior.
the operating system does not interpret it in anyway.
*in any_way. ;)
I’m just gonna pretend I didn’t hear that.
⏰️.🪵
ChatGPT is taking notes
10 seconds of googling indicates this is true for Windows and Mac as well. I haven’t looked specifically, but I’d be a little surprised if it wasn’t true for Android and iOS as well.
But really, why would they add rules to prevent people from using certain unicode codepoints in filenames? Should they disallow Klingon as well? Kanji? Of course not. Emojis are codepoints just like U+0061 is.
Of course there are good reasons to disallow things like newlines and forward slashes in Linux filenames, but what specifically would even be the argument for preventing emojis?
Same for Windows (11): I just renamed a file to an apple emoji
You can, but I downloaded some music the other day and I was trying to put the files onto my phone using KDE Connect, and I couldn’t understand why is wasn’t working until I got rid of the star emoji in the filenames. So I think Graphene/Android might still struggle with it.
Lol, I think that’s how I learned it was possible, too.
yt-dlpuses the title as the filename, and all of the emojis came along with it. Was trying to rename them from terminal, but couldn’t do much when half the filenames started with the fire emoji lol.
It’s all just Unicode
You can have emoji as your WiFi network name too
Kinda interesting to see what older devices do when faced with such a network
What about an emoji only wifi password?
I think that may be possible for every filesystem supporting UTF-8 encoding.
You can use emojis for variable names in swift code.
I have been using emoji in macOS for many years. It can be very useful to tag files.
Computers should just know when I want a space to be part of a file name, and when I want them to be argument separators. No more escaping or quoting.
deleted by creator
I still use spaces
agreed, “still worth it”
I do, however, tend to keep spaces out of my folder names so i can just use quotes at the end.
/Images/Halloween/Projections/“Creepy Crawlies.mp4”
Oh\ come\ on,\ it\'s\ not\ that\ badSome shells enclose those types of files within inverted commas. Such that:
> ls file\ name.mdis instead
> ls 'file name.md'(I use fish)
“inverted commas”? single quotes?
Yes, I am a weird english.
What is the Old Continent name of those: `
On its own, the backtick is primarily used in computing, and so doesn’t have an old-timey-English name, nor does the Jargon File mention a Commonwealth Hackish name for it. While there are a variety of other names, I don’t think any of them are specific to the UK
When used with a letter, it marks a grave accent; this was its original purpose on a typewriter
Floating commas
In dutch I’ve heard them be called flying commas unapologetically (vliegende comma’s — ironically has one in it because many plurals need it, it doesn’t mark possession)
I tried to parse the first one but got all confused because there’s no closing single quote.
The number of keystrokes needed to type an underscore is the same that you need to type backslash space, so I don’t see how underscores are in improvement
Are you typing the whole filename by hand? Tab expansion exists, you know?
If it fucking works…
Sometimes it does. But not always.
Zsh changed my life, but I still hate escape chars in my command lines for readability reasons
the struggle between spaces in filenames look cute and oh fuck what’s the code to reference a space in a filename in terminal?
Just put the whole thing in quotes. You might have to escape extra sets of quotes, usually with a backslash.
Or you can also put a
\in front of the spaceIf you intend on using that with tab completions, you will have extra work to do.
Some shells put the path in quotes automatically as you attempt to complete anything with spaces in it.
Yeah, just need to set it up correctly.
