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Re: [bug-diffutils] bug#68695: Please, fix documentation on whitespace i


From: Collin Funk
Subject: Re: [bug-diffutils] bug#68695: Please, fix documentation on whitespace in pathnames
Date: Sun, 05 Jan 2025 10:57:43 -0800
User-agent: Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13)

Hi everyone,

Andreas Grünbacher <andreas.gruenbacher@gmail.com> writes:

> [] FUTURE DIRECTIONS
> []
> [] If this utility is directed to display a pathname that contains any
> bytes that have the encoded value of a <newline> character
> [] when <newline> is a terminator or separator in the output format
> being used, implementations are encouraged to treat this as an error.
> [] A future version of this standard may require implementations to
> treat this as an error.
>
> I'm not sure about the intention behind those two conflicting
> statements. Any thoughts?

As far as I remember, POSIX 2024 added commentary similar to the one
above to all programs that interact with files. I believe the reasoning
was to prevent behavior like this which may be unexpected:

    $ for file in `find . -type f`; do echo "$file"; done
    ./abc
    def
    ./file1
    ./file2
    $ ls
    'abc'$'\n''def'   file1   file2

This recommendation also applies to something like touch. So the
recommendation would be for this to fail:

    $ touch 'abc
    def'

Coreutils doesn't follow that recommendation so I was able to create the
file.

I don't disagree with the recommendation, but it will be a bit awkward
if some programs work with newlines and some do not. And just before the
release is probably too late to change it.

Collin



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