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Comment by Chlorus | Hacker News Reader

Almost every CLI program I've ever used in Windows has no problem with spaces in filenames, so I don't exactly why he's fixated on the GUI... But I had forgotten, computers aren't useful as tools to accomplish work, but as mechanisms to assuage intellectual inferiority complexes. He should advocate for punch cards again, since that would certainly stop morons from using computers.

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> Almost every CLI program I've ever used in Windows has no problem with spaces in filenames, so I don't exactly ...

Just to clarify on what we think as problem could differ:

    C:\Users\hzhou>ls *.txt
    new  2.txt

    C:\Users\hzhou>ls new  2.txt
    ls: new: No such file or directory
    ls: 2.txt: No such file or directory

dir works fine for that.

I actually didn't know that dir supported multiple globs for filenames! I've never had a need for that.

Super cool.

Um... no it doesn't. It takes each space delimited name as a new name. You will need to add "" and quote the names -- but Windows shell only has one level of quoting, (") which means you can't easily type the command you need. Unix shell is a bit better. Unix only appears worse because people do attempt scripting.

Directory of C:\Users\fred

12/14/2017 04:44 PM 1,556 new 2.txt 1 File(s) 1,556 bytes 0 Dir(s) 75,989,876,736 bytes free

C:\Users\fred>dir new 2.txt Volume in drive C has no label. Volume Serial Number is BA05-C445

Directory of C:\Users\fred

File Not Found

C:\Users\fred>

> Um... no it doesn't. It takes each space delimited name as a new name. You will need to add "" and quote the names -- but Windows shell only has one level of quoting, (") which means you can't easily type the command you need. Unix shell is a bit better. Unix only appears worse because people do attempt scripting.

Ah I see, you have a file "new 2.txt", I was a bit confused.

Not sure what you mean by only 1 level of quoting being a problem, sorry.

> Ah I see, you have a file "new 2.txt", I was a bit confused.

This is highly ironical, given this thread.

Some people seems to advocate for programs to be better than humans at globbing filenames.

That's a great point. Computers sure have the potential to deal with spaces just fine. But if textual interaction is a requirement, we can only have one of arbitrary filenames and clutter-free syntax.

Window and Linux shells have the same ideas about spaces in file names, which is that if they appear they need to be quoted or the space character needs to be escaped.

Outside of Make which has long and boring historical reasons for not supporting spaces well, just about every program is fine with spaces.

In UNIX shell, IFS variable can be set to an other characters, e.g. newline and tab, or to empty string.

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