Removal of stone age relics

[uwe-bungto]

i am just thinking out loud about a LinuxStone_Age-Relic that needs to be polished.

I think most of us have slipped in to the naming convention for files and directories of writing in recognizable plain text.
eg.

This Song.mpg

or a directory. called

My Songs Dir

from the desktop almost everything can be done to this file or dir. Almost.
Some times the command line is needed

sudo chown xxx My Songs Dir

Linux falls over because it can not handle separate words as a name.

Do you think that this feature, wanted or forgotten, will be updated?

[steeldriver]

You can use any of these options

1. backslash escaping

sudo chown xxx My\ Songs\ Dir

2. single quotes

sudo chown xxx 'My Songs Dir'

3. double quotes

sudo chown xxx "My Songs Dir"

Double quotes allow parameter expansion e.g.

sudo chown xxx "My Songs Dir/*.mp3"

whereas single quotes treat everything them as literal. Tab completion makes escaping spaces particularly painless.

[sffvba[e0rt]

Tab completion makes escaping spaces particularly painless.

Tab complete FTW!

[ralph-beeby]

Tab complete FTW!

+1 to that!

I think it comes down to familiarity. Sure, the issue you describe is less-than-ideal, but once you're comfortable with workarounds like tab-complete, or backslash delimiting, the terminal can be very efficient. Personally, I've found that it's easier than trying to point-and-click everything if you're moving large numbers of files around. You do have to be careful with commands like mv and rm though, as I'm not aware of any undo switch or Rubbish Bin if you accidentally delete something via the terminal - though I could be mistaken!

[buzzingrobot]

The alternative is always treating arguments with spaces as if they are always escaped. That doesn't work when you want the arguments treated individually. So, you would need to escape, or otherwise qualify them, in some manner, when you did.

In the end, it's a wash.

[ajgreeny]

+1 to that!

I think it comes down to familiarity. Sure, the issue you describe is less-than-ideal, but once you're comfortable with workarounds like tab-complete, or backslash delimiting, the terminal can be very efficient. Personally, I've found that it's easier than trying to point-and-click everything if you're moving large numbers of files around. You do have to be careful with commands like mv and rm though, as I'm not aware of any undo switch or Rubbish Bin if you accidentally delete something via the terminal - though I could be mistaken!

To allow for second thought I use aliases to add the -i option (interactive) for cp, mv and rm in my .bash_aliases file to make them all safer, eg alias cp='cp -i'

Then if I attempt to copy a file which will overwrite another file of the same name, the terminal will ask if I want to continue, allowing me to investigate further before doing something I might regret later. Similarly for mv and most importantly rm; once you have rm'd a file it is gone.

[lykwydchykyn]

If there's a command line interpreter out there that can deal with spaces in a file name without escaping or quoting, I'm not aware of it. It's the nature of the beast.

[uwe-bungto]

You can use any of these options

1. backslash escaping

sudo chown xxx My\ Songs\ Dir

2. single quotes

sudo chown xxx 'My Songs Dir'

3. double quotes

sudo chown xxx "My Songs Dir"

Double quotes allow parameter expansion e.g.

sudo chown xxx "My Songs Dir/*.mp3"

whereas single quotes treat everything them as literal. Tab completion makes escaping spaces particularly painless.

Thanks
I got into the habit of just cuting & pasteing into a terminal, I can't remember if I forgot this or never knew it.

I think it would be better if some of the old code was brought up to date.

[steeldriver]

I think it would be better if some of the old code was brought up to date.

So... let me play devil's advocate here

$ mkdir tests

$ touch tests/file tests/file\ -al

$ ls tests
file  file -al

Now, what do you expect to be the result of

$ ls tests/file -al

? The point being that there needs to be some agreed delimiter (or field separator) in order for the command to be broken into lexical units - if not whitespace then what?

[buzzingrobot]

Just occurred to me that if someone took the notion of removing this 'relic' seriously, they would need to rewrite Bash, rewrite every tool that depends on Bash to parse its command line arguments, and also cope with the blowback for forcing rewrites of a significant majority of all Bash scripts ever written.

Such things help explain why software is a conservative affair.