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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

#542

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…

I find this attitude misguided. More descriptive names are more ergonomic for things you only use rarely but they need to be combined with much better autocompletion than most shells provide by default.

Spaces don't make anything more descriptive, they just cause completely unnecessary quoting and escaping hassle.

The amount of time that has been wasted by Windows using "C:\Program Files" instead of "C:\Program_Files" far outweighs any highly questionable aesthetic benefit IMO.

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

#543
post #507
post #472

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Word of warning from hard experience: rn is a really dangerous thing to name a function because it is one char away from rm.

One char away also physically on the keyboard (maybe that's what you meant?).

Yeah, the physical layout is the primary concern. I should have noted that since there is ambiguity because n and m also happen to be next to each other in the alphabet.

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

#544
post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re clearly a more capable user than me, but even so, take care. The time I accidentally moved /etc has scarred me for life.

Early on in my Linux-using-life I made the mistake of deleting /etc. That was a learning experience like no other :)

Since Live CDs/Flash drives were invented, I wouldn't worry about this stuff any longer. Certainly have your personal files in a centralized location and backed up first.

Probably the easiest way to experiment these days is to create a VM and make snapshot, then start knocking down walls, just to see when and where the house collapses. Then revert and try something new.

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

#545

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Better solution: only allow ASCII, maybe dashes, and up to twelve characters. Problem solved. Enforce this in LDAP. Strict convention is better than flexibility and predicting obscure edge cases that can fail.

only allow ASCII, maybe dashes, and up to twelve characters. Problem solved ...and only hire people from the exact same background as you, who will never have unusual characters or accents in their name. And also make sure not to have any users who aren't exactly like you, and conform to this very narrow requirement. Surely, excluding 90% of the world won't hurt revenue in any way.

This is not excluding? I just use an ascii canonicalized version of my name and works fine.

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

#546
post #314

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Ugh, we have the 15 character Active Directory limit now with hostnames, and a previous IT administration has imposed a convention that every name had to follow [prod|dev]-[ph|vm]-[service]-[nn]. So basically every production service is prod-vm-owtf-01— you get exactly four characters to actually describe what the machine does. Works great when the service is "jira" or "wiki", but there are a lot that are pretty myst…

I kind of like that honestly. No doubt you need some documentation so everyone knows what the service abbreviations are, but after you've been working there for a month you get it. Makes everything clean, consistent, and informational. You can quickly ascertain what a specific host is doing just from the name.

Oh absolutely it makes sense to have a standard, and being able to tell at a glance if something is a VM or physical machine is of value also. But dedicating 2/3s of the character budget to such a scheme is madness. If the prod-vm- prefix simply become pv-, then you'd at least be able to do pv-jenkins-01 again.

Anyway, all this was fine when we were on LDAP rather than Active Directory. So basically it's all Windows' fault.

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

#549
post #435

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Overly aggresive is right! I don't know if this is genius or deranged! I'm leaning towards genius and stealing the idea. By the way: what's your beef with en dashes? I mean, if it was "everything should be 'HYPHEN-MINUS' (U+002D)", then fine, but why specifically en dashes and not em dashes?

> By the way: what's your beef with en dashes? Of all the changes in that list, removing the character that doesn't appear on a standard keyboard seems like the least controversial...

A better question might be "how did it get there in the first place?"

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

#550
post #278

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Except for \Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts, of course.

I occasionally try to search for the reasoning behind the location of the hosts file in Windows, and I always come up blank.

They originally copied BSD's network stack, IIRC
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