Oil fixes this problem with QSN: http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2020/10/osh-features.html#safe-...

You can have newlines in filenames, but you can also pass binary data with \0 if you want (it's 8 bit clean). Or you can use read -0 for a NUL delimiter, and eventually length-prefixed blobs with netstrings.

The way I now think of it is that Oil should have all 3 solutions to "the framing problem" in networking: delimiting, escaping, and length prefixing. So you can convert from one regime to the other by using shell.

That would pose problems also. The real solution, with no need to magic as you say, is to disallow spaces at the filesystem level (just like slashes and the null character are forbidden). For users typing filenames, this shouldn't be a problem, as those can be encoded e.g., as unicode's non-breaking space. Using space as a separator is a very important power, that other programming languages share. In what other programming language can you put spaces in variable names? In the shell, filenames are variable names! It is only natural that a space cannot appear inside a filename (but of course, most other unicode characters can).

> In what other programming language can you put spaces in variable names?

PowerShell; although you have to use long form to do it:

    PS C:\> ${var with spaces} = 1

    PS C:\> Get-Variable *space*

    Name                           Value                                                                                                       
    ----                           -----                                                                                                       
    var with spaces                1                                                                                                           



    PS C:\> ${var with spaces} + 2
    3

> In what other programming language can you put spaces in variable names?

In SQL, notably. Such identifiers need to be quoted, of course.

> In what other programming language can you put spaces in variable names?

ISTR that many dynamic languages allow this with dynamic assignment features, but you often need to use similar dynamic access functiona rather than simple variable access to access them.

Ruby also allows whitespace if it is unicode but not ASCII whitespace, without use of dynamic assignment/access methods.

SQL allows spaces in object names but requires quoting, similar to shell.

This would require filenames became valid utf-8. This would be a good thing to do nowadays, irritatingly (having tried handling Unix filenames as utf 8 in the past), surprisingly many users have non-utf8 filenames.

> This would require filenames became valid utf-8.

No, it wouldn't; you'd just get EINVAL if you pass a filename containing "\x20" to open or other syscalls. If a application wants to use "\xC2\xA0" in a filename, it can do that, or it can not do that, same as currently. Same applies if it wants to use, say, "\xAA\xFF".

You can have spaces in F# variable names and functions :)

I totally agree that file names shouldn't have spaces because they are variables, and I (usually) name all my files with camelBackNotation names as I was taught is best practice for variable names. That said, with every command I remember running, treating the file name like a string - e.g. "file name.png" - has worked whenever I encounter spaces, no escape characters required.

The problem is shell is when I want to write something like 'find . | grep namepiece | xargs rm', or something like that. I can work around this by piling everything into the find, or in some cases by liberally spreading -0s around, but neither feel very "shell-like" to me.

Thus it seems that a filesystem that forbade spaces in its filenames would solve your problems with the shell? Sounds good to me!

I don't see a functional difference in denying spaces in paths from denying new lines in paths.

My dream OS would forbid path names that don't match \w in grep.