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

[David A. Wheeler]

address@hidden said:
>The 'escaping' support is finished and a release is available....
>tla uses (pika) escaped filenames from now on. For every command which
>spits out informationm uses escaping by default too! Many (if not all)
>commands have a --unescaped option to turn escaping for information on
>the console off (please notify me if I missed something).
...
>should be rewritten as
>tla tree-lint -t --unescaped | while read file;
>do tla add "$file";
>done

I am _delighted_ that filenames with spaces can finally
be handled correctly, that was a serious deficiency I noted earlier.
Thanks for your hard work!!

However, I'm a little mystified.  Why does the tla output by
default use these escape sequences, even when all you
want is a list of files?  Embedding the escaping mechanism
in the output (instead of just the internal storage) adds various
complexities to shell scripts, and you can be certain that people will
forget to add the option where needed.

Why not have the "unescaped" version the default
in places where only filenames are output, with \n at the end, and
then have people add "--escaped" when they need it?
That way user-created shell scripts work will more readily.
That doesn't work with embedded \n in filenames, but that's a pretty rare
requirement for source code, and could be handled by --escaped if
they needed it.

Wondering...

--- David A. Wheeler <address@hidden>