If any of you reading this have to deal with very large scale data pipelines for data science / ML type processing, and if "don't use spaces and weird chars in file names" hasn't become second nature by now, let me just say: you are very, very brave.
I'm “still afraid to use spaces in file names” years old
141–150 of 817 posts
Re: I'm “still afraid to use spaces in file names” years old
#142I'm hardly afraid but I just think it's poor ergonomics. Same as the move from xset m 0 0 to xinput --set-prop 'pointer:Logitech USB Receiver' 'libinput Accel Profile Enabled' 0, 1 Everything seems to be going this way in Linux land. Longer names, harder to type names, camelcase names, spaces... I'm looking forward to an OS that treats command line ergonomics as a first class feature and where camelcase & spaces are…
The problem is we're optimizing for "easy to learn" rather than "easy to use".
In a world of broken promises and tool churn, minimizing tooling investment isn't laziness, it's a defense mechanism.
This is a lesson I had to learn the hard way, multiple times.
Re: I'm “still afraid to use spaces in file names” years old
#143Even if libraries all handled it, I’d still personally avoid spaces because spaces get semantically used to separate tokens and I see file names as tokens.
Re: I'm “still afraid to use spaces in file names” years old
#144I'm hardly afraid but I just think it's poor ergonomics. Same as the move from xset m 0 0 to xinput --set-prop 'pointer:Logitech USB Receiver' 'libinput Accel Profile Enabled' 0, 1 Everything seems to be going this way in Linux land. Longer names, harder to type names, camelcase names, spaces... I'm looking forward to an OS that treats command line ergonomics as a first class feature and where camelcase & spaces are…
The problem is we're optimizing for "easy to learn" rather than "easy to use".
That may be a part of the problem but honestly I don't feel like all these new crazy interfaces are easy to learn either. I mean how do you come up with the lithany xinput calls for? You need to understand the syntax for specifying a device. You need to know that you're to set a libinput property, and you need to know the name of that property, and it's not documented in xinput man page, and of course you need to know the values to pass which again are not documented in xinput man page. You can play with --list-props and then take your search elsewhere because it is completely opaque and doesn't explain what the properties actually do.
I suspect the number of people who figured all that out without having to find it by googling / arch wiki / whatever is very very low.
Now I'm not gonna say xset is the easiest interface to figure out, but the syntax for setting mouse acceleration is right there in the synopsis, and if you search down the man page, you'll learn a little more (and also if you just run xset without arguments, it'll tell you how to set mouse acceleration). It might not be the best designed tool but it's something I learned back in the day as a teenager just by looking at the man page.
I think the real issue is that people nowadays are designing these interfaces to be consumed by interactive configuration tools, GUI apps, and desktop environments; they're more dynamic, more complex, more flexible, but not easier to figure out, not for you on the command line. The command line is just a last resort. Second class citizen if you will.
Re: I'm “still afraid to use spaces in file names” years old
#145I have an uneasy feeling whenever I see a path parameter declared as string. Path is not a string - it's a sequence of path components and should be treated as such by our APIs. A path should be parsed once - on user input - and then used in its "sequence form" throughout the software stack. And "path component" is not an arbitrary string either - e.g. appending a path component to the path should first require conve…
"Path is not a string - it's a sequence of path components and should be treated as such by our APIs."
For maximum correctness, you want to turn it into a file handle as soon as possible, and do all operations through the variations of the file functions that end in "at", like: https://linux.die.net/man/2/openat
The downside of this approach is that you still technically have to carry the path around with you if you ever want to present it back to the user, because once you have a directory handle, you can get back to the root directory easily enough by following parent links and seeing what directories you end up in, but that may not be what the user "thinks" the path is, and they want to see their path, not a canonicalized one. And they're mostly right. And it's not easy to correctly track changes to their intended path from this basis either.
Basically, I don't know of a really solid, 100% correct way to handle this with any reasonable degree of effort.
Re: I'm “still afraid to use spaces in file names” years old
#146I am also that age, and kebab-case is the best case for filenames. 2021-01-01-some-important-document.pdf gives me the warm fuzzies. On the off chance that some more differentiation is needed, throw in an underscore and a whole new world opens up
> 2021-01-01
Yes on the date format.
Saves you so much time.
Re: I'm “still afraid to use spaces in file names” years old
#147If you're developing on Windows, I find a good way of dealing with this to convert paths to short format before using them (E.G. GetShortPathName in kernel32.dll).
Re: I'm “still afraid to use spaces in file names” years old
#148I'm “still afraid to use spaces in file names” wise, dammit!
Re: I'm “still afraid to use spaces in file names” years old
#149I am also that age, and kebab-case is the best case for filenames. 2021-01-01-some-important-document.pdf gives me the warm fuzzies. On the off chance that some more differentiation is needed, throw in an underscore and a whole new world opens up
I go one step further: 2021-11-11_client_project-name.ext 2021-11-11_client_projectName.ext is also OK. But underscore separates fields, hyphens for space replacement.
this is the way
Re: I'm “still afraid to use spaces in file names” years old
#150I love it when characters like | break OneDrive