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Control characters in file names

Posted Nov 25, 2010 16:52 UTC (Thu) by Spudd86 (guest, #51683)
In reply to: Control characters in file names by cmccabe
Parent article: Ghosts of Unix past, part 4: High-maintenance designs

Wait 'till you start running shell scripts on directories! (Handling file names with control characters in the name correctly can take HUNDREDS of lines of code in shell, people frequently write scripts that break when ask them to handle names with spaces, and that's EASY)

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Posted Nov 25, 2010 23:20 UTC (Thu) by cmccabe (guest, #60281) [Link]

After reading that essay, I am convinced that we should ban control characters in filenames through one of the mechanisms described. UTF-8 doesn't use them, and all human languages should be representable with UTF-8. So allowing control characters is just a pointless duplication of functionality, like supporting pascal-style strings alongside C-style strings in the syscall API.