Filesystems and case-insensitivity [LWN.net]

Filesystems and case-insensitivity

Posted Nov 29, 2018 13:41 UTC (Thu) by utoddl (guest, #1232)
In reply to: Filesystems and case-insensitivity by perennialmind
Parent article: Filesystems and case-insensitivity

I was with you until you got to spaces. It's only wishing of course, but I wish spaces in file names would go away. Personal peeve.

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Filesystems and case-insensitivity

Posted Nov 30, 2018 9:04 UTC (Fri) by jezuch (subscriber, #52988) [Link] (2 responses)

Spaces in file names are wonderful. You can name your files like a human being, not a slave of poorly written shell scripts with broken quoting :) (I have a pet peeve too)

Filesystems and case-insensitivity

Posted Dec 3, 2018 12:30 UTC (Mon) by ale2018 (subscriber, #128727) [Link] (1 responses)

Ah, poorly written shell scripts, eh? Because you obviously think that being slave of over-complicated command lines is fine? A good percentage of my command lines start with find . -name whatever | xargs... Yes, I know I can write -print0 and -0, I do that when I write shell scripts.

When I find a filename with spaces I just move it away.

For the record, the normalization step and control characters were never taken care of. For example:

    ~$ touch aaabd $(printf 'aaabc\bd')  "$(printf 'aaabc\nd')"
    ~$ ls -lt | head -5
    total 3686968
    -rw-r--r--  1 ale ale                 0 Dec  3 13:21 aaabd
    -rw-r--r--  1 ale ale                 0 Dec  3 13:21 aaabc
    d
    -rw-r--r--  1 ale ale                 0 Dec  3 13:21 aaabd

Control characters where never forbidden. Consider that human beings are sometimes uncertain about the name they're typing and type a backspace (\b) in it. So, why isn't that beautiful too? Perhaps, users should have a clue. In the words of the Ancient Philosophy, rubbish in, rubbish out.

Filesystems and case-insensitivity

Posted Dec 3, 2018 20:24 UTC (Mon) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

ls took care of that a few years ago…

~/test $ ls
'aaabc'$'\b''d'  'aaabc'$'\n''d'   aaabd
~/test $ ls --version
ls (GNU coreutils) 8.30
Packaged by Gentoo (8.30 (p01))