Re:I'm “still afraid to use spaces in file names” years old
by chasil on Thursday November 11, 2021 @05:35PM
(#29194147)
This appears to demonstrate the full range of abuse.
$ mkdir hold
$ cd hold
$ cat ../wildname.c
#include <stdio.h>
int main(int argc, char **argv)
{ char n[256]; int i,j=0; FILE *fp;
for(i=1; i<256; i++) if(i!=47) n[j++] = i; n[j] = 0;
if(fp = fopen(n, "w")) { fprintf(fp, "hello world!"); fclose(fp); }
}
$ cc ../wildname.c
$ ./a.out
$ ls -l
total 16
-rw-r--r--. 1 luser lgroup 12 Nov 11 16:32 ??????????????????????????????? !"#$%&'()*+,-.0123456789:;<=>?
@ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ[\]^_`abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz{|}~?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????
-rwxr-xr-x. 1 luser lgroup 8464 Nov 11 16:32 a.out
Re:I'm “still afraid to use spaces in file names” years old
by oblio on Thursday November 11, 2021 @06:02PM
(#29194375)
It's software. Software's contract is the same as a legal contract. And a legal contract mostly says what you can't do.
So anything not directly blocked by the software is allowed.
Ergo, clear specifications, strict yet flexible types and APIs, etc.
Otherwise, it's just bad design.
Want to see true craziness? POSIX file names are just a bag of bytes. They don't even have to be text, they can be anything (almost), there's no standard text encoding:
https://lwn.net/Articles/325304/
And in typical Open Source fashion, someone actually claims it's a feature: https://lwn.net/Articles/325398/ because hey, you 99.999% percenters can suffer so that I, 0.001% percenter can implement my wacky system.
https://xkcd.com/1172/