On Fri, Jul 18, 2014 at 3:38 PM, Robert Moonen <n0b0dy@bigpond.net.au> wrote:
On 17/07/14 21:51, Brett Pemberton wrote:
On Thu, Jul 17, 2014 at 9:35 PM, Daniel Jitnah <djitnah@greenwareit.com.au> wrote:
I'd have the same response to someone using _ instead of a space. Why bother? May be because:
danyj@git-deb7-64:~/test$ touch windows danyj@git-deb7-64:~/test$ touch 7 danyj@git-deb7-64:~/test$ touch windows\ 7 danyj@git-deb7-64:~/test$ ls -l total 0 -rw-r--r-- 1 danyj danyj 0 Jul 17 21:23 7 -rw-r--r-- 1 danyj danyj 0 Jul 17 21:23 windows -rw-r--r-- 1 danyj danyj 0 Jul 17 21:23 windows 7 danyj@git-deb7-64:~/test$ rm -rf windows 7 danyj@git-deb7-64:~/test$ ls -l total 0 -rw-r--r-- 1 danyj danyj 0 Jul 17 21:23 windows 7 danyj@git-deb7-64:~/test$
Sorry, I'm honestly at a loss as to what you were demonstrating there.
Ehm, he is demonstrating that bash command line utilities become easily confused then using files with spaces in their names.
Err, no, they don't.
What was asked? 1.) to delete the file windows 7
Not even close
What happened? 1.) the files windows and 7 were deleted
As it was asked to do. What this shows is that if you don't use interactive mode on your rm commands, and don't sanity check that you're asking to remove the correct file, you may accidentally remove the wrong file. That's true whether there are spaces in your filenames or not. The command in question wasn't confused at all. The user was. As I said in a private response, the issue here is a user giving the wrong input to rm, we can all agree on that, right? Some people's reaction to this hypothetical problem is "Don't use spaces in filenames, then you won't accidentally remove the wrong files when you tell rm to rm the wrong files" My reaction is "Don't tell rm to remove the wrong files". Use rm -i Do: ls "this is the file I want to remove" first, and then after confirming that it's correct, up arrow, home, repace ls with rm Use tab completion to assist in hitting the right file etc etc. However treating this hypothetical by arbitrarily choosing a subset of POSIX-OK characters in filenames is a silly response, in my opinion. Yours may vary, and that's fine. / Brett