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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

#591

Post by zepearl »

zajio1am wrote: post #409
tambourine_man wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> But underscore separates fields, hyphens for space replacement But why not the other way, hyphen-minus for separating fields and underscore for space replacement? That seems to me more consistent with how underscores and dashes are used.

I fully agree, that's how I do it :)

my_project-some_activity-this_document-20210923-v02.txt

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

#592

Post by lillecarl »

Spivak wrote: post #307
0des wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know, this makes me wonder.. tangentially speaking- I wonder how hard it would be to rearrange the folder structure in linux so that I have something like this: /Users/{root, user0, user1, ... }... /System/{Logs, Apps/{opt, container, ...}, Temp, Conf ...}... /Devices/{Mount, sda, sdb, null ...}... /Boot/...

I mean we're heading there with /usr being your /System. Redhat/Pottering are doing heroic work in this space. /Users -> /home /System -> /usr /Data -> /var /Config -> /etc /Boot -> /boot /Ephemeral Temp -> /run /Persistent Temp -> /tmp The only real holdouts are proc/sys/dev which are the kernel and mnt/media/opt/srv which are really for the user/sysadmin and aren't really used by the OS anymore.

I'm not sure I'm a fan of the capitalization and spaces, other than that I'm all for more self-explanatory names.

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

#593

Post by Avalaxy »

Joker_vD wrote: post #26

One of the main reasons why Windows used "Program Files" and "Documents and Settings" was to force the programs (and programmers) to deal with paths with spaces. And you know, for the most part it kinda, more or less worked out although of course even today you will find programs that ask you to install them in a folder without spaces in the path.

Yet in Microsofts own cmd tool I need to put quotes around my path if I want to refer to any files/folders below those folders.

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

#594

Post by kazinator »

Spaces in file names are a poor idea. File names are identifiers, not titles.

Let's test something: http://example.com/my silly webpage.html.

Hey look, HackerNews just broke a URL with spaces in it. And it's written in a Lisp dialect and all; it's not some Unix job cobbed together with shell, sed and awk. The language has a string data type, and strings are passed to functions without word-breaking interpolations taking place.

You know what else breaks on spaces? Basic everyday gui text manipulation.

Suppose that in a block of text we have the sentence:

> Please look for the Holiday Schedule 2021 file.

If you double click on any part of the name like Schedule, pretty much every text widget on the planet will just select only that word, and not the entire filename.

However, if you have:

> Please look for the holiday-schedule-2021 file.

There is at least a ghost of a chance that a semi-intelligent GUI can pick that out as a word.

There exist good reasons to keep identifiers as clump beyond just command line shells.

It's why we need encoding like %20 in URLs that never pass through a shell script.

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

#595

Post by torstenvl »

chungy wrote: post #562
TacticalCoder wrote: post #169

Define " space ". Is the Hangul filler we talked about yesterday a spacing character? Is the zero-width non-breaking space a spacing character? What about the typographic spacing characters? You should better be very afraid of using spaces in filenames. You should do everything you can to support them but you have to know you'll invariably encounter countless cases where you'll have this or that tool that won't work…

> I still live in a world where I cannot name a song from the french group L'impératrice with an eacute in the filename or my car's media system will display garbage (it's running QNX and I don't know which filesystem). I have an Android phone and I tell MusicBrainz Picard to save all files with ASCII-only names and Windows-compatible names for the ones that get sent over to the phone. Basically for this reason. Some…

What do you mean, display garbage?

L'imp?ratrice? L'imp�ratrice? L'impératrice? L'imp‚ratrice? L'impÚratrice?

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

#596

Post by henrikschroder »

alpaca128 wrote: post #120
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…

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.

C:\PROGRA~1

Easy fix!

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

#597

Post by frenchyatwork »

skohan wrote: post #76
chrismorgan wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

camelCase is objectively harder to read than snake_case or kebab-case, though familiarity can mitigate that.

I'd argue it's at most a tiny bit harder to read, and a lot easier to type. On balance I'd rather avoid making a pinky key one of the keys I have to use the most.

Having used a lot of all the formats, it's argue it's a lot easier to read an a tiny bit harder to type. For typing it's basically just an extra `-` because unless your alternative is nocase.

For reading, CamelCase has 2 significant ambiguity issues: similarity between I and l, and what do you do with acronyms. Acronyms wouldn't actually be a problem if everybody just wrote them would in snake_case (i.e. only capitalize the first letter), but they don't and so it's anyone's guess whether you're going to get "Id" or "ID".

There's also a minor issue where if you're on a case-insensitive file system it can be a little difficult to change casing, but adding/removing underscores is easy.

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

#598

Post by InfiniteRand »

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…

It's easy to tell users to make a folder with no spaces if you're setting up a global path, however if you have an application that runs in user directories things can become painful fast. Changing your user name is a pain and can leave things inconsistent, but having to handle all the variations in people's names with spaces, punctuation, international characters, can just be mind boggling.

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

#599

Post by anyfoo »

0des wrote: post #190
323 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Documents and Settings" still exists on Windows 10, as a soft link to "Users".

You know, this makes me wonder.. tangentially speaking- I wonder how hard it would be to rearrange the folder structure in linux so that I have something like this: /Users/{root, user0, user1, ... }... /System/{Logs, Apps/{opt, container, ...}, Temp, Conf ...}... /Devices/{Mount, sda, sdb, null ...}... /Boot/...

Is it coincidence that you almost exactly replicated what macOS has? Except that /Devices is /Volumes, .../Apps is .../Applications. and /Boot is handled differently.

Of course, that's not perfect either, because a) decades of changes vs. compatibility have made it less clean in certain places, and b) pretty much all the POSIX paths still exist for unix-y compatibility, but overall it's like that.

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

#600

Post by billti »

alpaca128 wrote: post #120
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…

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.

And then to really mess you up and ensure you handle parens properly, threw “(x86)” into the mix. (A real pain on some REPLs as well as dealing with environment variables).
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