> paths may contain spaces

what kind of savage puts spaces on their paths? Failing in such cases is a neat feature it would seem.

I never understood why common filesystems allow this foolishness. There are already other semantically meaningful characters in paths that are forbidden, like '/' or '\0'. Disallowing bare spaces in filenames is such a natural feature that it makes no sense to deal with all this stupid quoting pain. Any space that is entered by a user in a filename context should be transparently translated to a unicode non-breaking space. Most users wouldn't notice, and shell scripts authors would be much happier!