Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Re: File naming conventions

[Zenaan Harkness]

On Thu, 2004-10-21 at 09:58, Matthieu Moy wrote:
> Zenaan Harkness <address@hidden> writes:
> 
> > Which is therefore a bug in tla inventory: missing -0 option.
> 
> This has already been discussed on this list. Tom didn't agree for
> some reasons I couldn't explain.

There is a likelihood that he didn't have time to implement an
alternative, and also lacked the motivation in that doing so would
instantaneously render pika escaping a second class citizen for "your
average Unixy guy", which would undermine the grand (and presumably very
useful and even more Unixy-in-the-long-term) plan for pika escaping
usage and syntax.

At the end of the day, I suspect code talks well enough that a
pika-escape-removing, null-termination-adding _option_ (say, perhaps,
"-0" comes to mind :) would be acceptable.

> Another option would be to rewrite xargs. Tom suggested an "xxargs"
> that would be pika-escaping aware. I'd like to have this called "tla
> xargs" :
> 
> tla inventory --junk | tla xargs rm
> 
> That would work with whatever characters in filenames.

Actually, I like that. In fact, I was proposing this type of "tla
command" convention earlier on, eg:

 tla rm
 tla rmdir
 tla cp
 tla mv
 tla grep
 tla xargs
 tla ln

There is a strong argument that if tla is behaving differently to
traditional Unix tools, that it should provide such sub commands
(well, the argument is strong in my mind at least :)

I think it comes down to man hours ... for me, perhaps next year.

cheers
zen