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I'm “still afraid to use spaces in file names” years old

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Re: I'm “still afraid to use spaces in file names” years old

#461

Post by prionassembly »

formerly_proven wrote: post #81
foxfluff wrote: post #17

I'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…

Cue nmcli (CLI for Gnome's NetworkManager) which uses UUIDs for everything and (at least a while ago) did not accept partial-but-unique UUIDs. Basically goes "nmcli connection up 5095665a-d82c-4ae6-8964-283623387941".

apt-get install nmtui # it's better

Re: I'm “still afraid to use spaces in file names” years old

#462

Post by pixelbeat__ »

POSIX portable file names were defined not to have spaces, and just contain '[[:alnum:]_./]'.

The findnl script as part of fslint identifies problematic patterns, and has 4 levels of stringency, with "POSIX" being the most stringent. https://github.com/pixelb/fslint/blob/master/fslint/findnl

Re: I'm “still afraid to use spaces in file names” years old

#464

Post by scubbo »

ajmurmann wrote: post #282
Izkata wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Pro tip: rename your development directory (or even better: the workspace path in CI) to put a space and/or special characters in it. A former co-worker changed his name in our auth system to include an apostrophe, so that whenever we handled names wrong he'd find it.

A related too for CI: change the system time to be a time zone that is during your work hours in a different day already than UTC. Really helped getting failures earlier than 4pm PST.

Could you consider rephrasing this? It sounds like an interesting observation that I'd love to understand, but I'm genuinely not able to parse it.

My best guess is "change the system time to be a timezone for which, during your work hours, the other-timezone is in a different day than UTC is" - but I'm still not sure what effect that would have on CI failures.

Re: I'm “still afraid to use spaces in file names” years old

#465

Post by moontear »

hetspookjee wrote: post #458
alpaca128 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like MS had the same idea according to an answer in the link: > Microsoft intentionally made programs install to C:\Program Files on Windows 95+ to force programmers to deal with spaces in filenames.

I wonder how much global work could have been saved if Microsoft also provided a covered interface for all paths in the system. Not sure if there is any, but one good implementation might save thousands of poor implementations required to handle it.

You mean like the Environment.SpecialFolders enum?

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.environme...

There are several other classes that take care of getting folders, least of which checking system variables.

Re: I'm “still afraid to use spaces in file names” years old

#466

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

sdenton4 wrote: post #255
hnuser847 wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question - what the heck are those characters?

Zalgo text: https://zalgo.org/ It was a great joke for a couple weeks two internets ago.

> two internets ago

It's been like three internets since I heard someone using "internet" as a measurement of time.

It's actually interesting to think about "generations" of internet, just like generations of people, and how the culture shifted between them.

There was a time in the early '00s when broadband was catching on, yet YouTube didn't exist. A time when Ebaumsworld and Newgrounds ruled the internet. When Homestar Runner was pop internet culture. Weebls Stuff. The frog blender.

Re: I'm “still afraid to use spaces in file names” years old

#467

Post by Someone »

selfhoster11 wrote: post #421
kijin wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've got a stray single quote in your shell. :)

That was a typo, but it seemed like a perfect illustration of my point, so I left it in.

Typo? I would guess it’s autocomplete at work. iOS does that all the time for me.

Re: I'm “still afraid to use spaces in file names” years old

#468

Post by dheera »

pimterry wrote: post #106

I work on a complex desktop application, and it's been astounding the number of bugs that have appeared over the years triggered by spaces and other unusual characters in file names. If you do anything with subprocesses or path processing, it's absurdly easy to hit in a thousand different ways, over and over again. Pro tip: rename your development directory (or even better: the workspace path in CI) to put a space an…

Or not, which when bugs crop up will teach the businessy types to stop putting spaces in their filenames.

Re: I'm “still afraid to use spaces in file names” years old

#470

Post by codetrotter »

I do it the other way around. I used to be afraid of spaces. But I have come to realize that it is better to learn sooner than later which pieces of software is in such a bad state that they aren’t handling spaces correctly.

That being said, even after all these years I sometimes need to try a few times in order to get the quoting and the escapes right when communicating names of files with spaces through multiple layers of software.

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