Re: [Gnu-arch-users] ANNOUNCE: Spaces in filenames, finished

[Mikhael Goikhman]

On 18 Mar 2004 12:23:07 +0100, address@hidden wrote:
> 
> > Would any other rare character be better for this purpose? Some
> > candidates are ':', ';', '?', '%', '#', '^', '*'. All characters
> > probably have one or another problem, but IMHO the problem with
> > backslash is inherently higher. One more thing to think about is this
> > proprietary OS uses backslash as the directory delimiter.
> 
> If '\' is the escape character and the tla uses it on some interface
> seen by other tools, the tools need to be aware of escaping.
> 
> If '%' is the escape character and the tla uses it on some interface
> seen by other tools, the tools need to be aware of escaping.
> 
> If '#' is the escape character and the tla uses it on some interface
> seen by other tools, the tools need to be aware of escaping.
> 
> ....
> 
> Do u see any difference?

Yes, I do.

Backslash is the only character that has special meaning inside double
quoted and sometimes even single quoted strings in most of the unix tools
and languages. So such new quoting scheme is designed to make the work
harder with these tools.

> I favoured shell/C escaping because shell can handle it natively, Tom
> wanted pika escaping. But it really makes no difference even if tla
> would use shell compatible escaping, tools would need to be aware of it
> to do the transformations at the right place. There is really no sense
> in discussing about, because any sane escaping scheme will work and
> tools need to be aware of escaping no matter which scheme is used.

The problem is not with special tools, but with general purpose ones.

I should explain to my potential users, why backslash was chosen and I
honestly can't. I see only problems with such choice. Users who need
fancy characters will constantly make errors on their unix shells.

Regards,
Mikhael.