*People who are used to work with bad tools don’t have spaces in their paths.

"C:\Documents and Settings" still hurts after all these years.

It still hurts today, because Microsoft puts a space between your first and last name in your profile if you are using a local account but not for a domain account, which causes all kinds of weird issues if you ever have to use cmd.exe...

"C:\Program Files(x86)". Who ok'd that?

It's a design decision and a good one, at that. Forcing 1 million developers to handle spaces properly while they spend 1 billion hours developing their software is preferable to 1 billion regular users having to remember to not use space, a perfectly good separator, in their 1 billion billions hours of usage of said software.

Speculation, but I suspect that Microsoft explicitly put both user data and programs in paths with long filenames and spaces to help force software to support those things. That always seemed like a good thing to me, it's ridiculous that we still have software that breaks on paths with spaces.

I haven't looked in a while, but last I checked you could also still get to it via C:\PROGRA~1? (This was years ago, that might have been 'fixed'?)

These are called 8.3 filenames. They're a filesystem feature. They're still created by default in Windows 10 on NTFS, but can be disabled or stripped using `fsutil`.

cough make cough

I don't know about "serious," but trustworthy operators use tools that work correctly in the presence of weird states because they take responsibility for their work instead of blaming others.

"Serious operators" never want to put their files into iCloud Drive? They must be using butterflies then

https://xkcd.com/378/

"Serious operators" probably use a cloud storage solution that supports WebDAV/FTP/SFTP, like box.com or Google Drive - "real operators", on the other hand, have a self-hosted solution (-; And IMHO relying on iCloud for essential data storage probably isn't a good idea.

I find iCloud much better than Google Cloud and I'm pretty sure I qualify as a "serious/real operator" any way you want to call it. I have no time or interest in hosting a custom solution. And I certainly have no need for FTP.

But even if I wasn't experienced, quit this gatekeeping crap. Let people use the tools that work for them. It does not in any way reflect on how "serious/real" they are.

> "Serious operators" probably use a cloud storage solution that supports WebDAV/FTP/SFTP, like box.com or Google Drive - "real operators", on the other hand, have a self-hosted solution (-;

I didn't mean to discredit you for using iCloud - if it came across that way, I apologize. My original comment was meant to be tongue in cheek. I've got to admit that I'm a bit gob-smacked by your reaction... After all, my comment was similar in structure to yours. I even quote unquoted the terms, and the "real operator" part was a reference to the editor war xkcd you mentioned. Taking your post literally, I could accuse you of doing the same thing by assuming that real operators were Mac users. And I'm sure there are many use cases where hosting your own cloud storage would be absurd. But, re-reading my comment, it didn't read like a flame war instigating piece of propaganda "Calling all real sysops to arms against the user threat. Grab your cattle prod, fellow comrades, and crank up the voltage!"

> And IMHO relying on iCloud for essential data storage probably isn't a good idea.

I don't condone gatekeeping (although, to be perfectly honest, I don't see how my comment could be interpreted as elitist. It's not like the learning curve for GDrive or any other solution with a better cross platform support is _that_ high), but I don't see a reason why I shouldn't voice my opinion on a tool, even if responding to something obviously meant as a joke. Of course you're free to use iCloud. Personally, I wouldn't feel comfortable with the thought of my critical data being stored on a platform that, historically, hasn't always been known for being extremely stable. Maybe I'm just biased. If you feel comfortable using it, then use it. I won't stand in your way.

I genuinely apologize as I think I misunderstood. Of course I'm fine with a bit of jokes about tech but I think I didn't catch any intended sarcasm in your comment—in fact I think I took the direct opposite intention.

I'm admittedly sensitive to gatekeeping. I do think it's one of the biggest reasons the tech industry is the monoculture it is.

Anyhow, I appreciate you clarifying and hope I didn't offend too much.

No problem. The subtleties of human speech don't carry over to text very well ;-)

rsync or btrfsync for the win

On the contrary, serious operators write programs to handle spaces in the paths.

That’s just objectively false.