On 18/07/14 15:54, Brian May wrote:

On 18 July 2014 15:38, Robert Moonen <n0b0dy@bigpond.net.au> wrote:
Ehm, he is demonstrating that bash command line utilities become easily
confused then using files with spaces in their names.

What was asked? 1.) to delete the file windows 7
What happened? 1.) the files windows and 7 were deleted

It is perhaps worth noting that "rm windows 7" gets translated by the shell into:

execve("/bin/rm", ["rm", "windows", "7"], [/* 59 vars */]) = 0

So as far as "rm" is concerned, there is no confusion.

Sorry, that was indeed a bad choice of words on my part, but I was just describing what was meant by the hypothetical proposed.

What I meant really is that the user becomes easily confused by the bash shells handling of certain characters some other OS users seem to take for granted.
I take it the hypothetical was proposed for this reason.

I saw on looking at the result immediately, that what had happened is that "windows" and "7" were provided as separate inputs to the rm command, so they were treated as separate filenames. This is obvious to a linux user, but not so obvious to a new linux user migrating from windows.

cheers

Robert

On Unix, it is the shell that is responsible for splitting the arguments, and it gets confused easily (i.e. it can't always tell exactly what is required). Last I checked, this is different on Windows.

--
Brian May <brian@microcomaustralia.com.au>
_______________________________________________
luv-main mailing list
luv-main@luv.asn.au
http://lists.luv.asn.au/listinfo/luv-main