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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

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pjmlp

I never understood what is so hard in treating the space as just another character.

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Because space is not just another character. Space separates args.

But an installer talking to the operating system shouldn't need to separate arguments anywhere.

Which is why escape characters and quotations were invented

which is why most arguments tend to have a way to be recognized like -, -- or /

Those are how one differentiates flags from arguments, which is a separate problem.

Kind of.

If your flag is for a path, you can assume everything up to the next flag is a path name.

myprog -filename here is my path with spaces -another_flag

Of course this depends on how the shell gives the arguments to the program.

On the other hand, there is no excuse why some GUI programs cannot handle spaces.

cp path1 path2

So, that's just one file?

It is an abject failing of software that perfectly reasonable characters are barred from filenames.

Treating the space as just another character in a path means that sometimes paths have to be placed inside quotes so the space isn't taken for the end of a commandline arg. Some old software didn't do that.

Chocolatey is not old software

No, it does not have that excuse.

But the packages it installs may.

The tilde file names in windows harken back to ye olde days of MSDOS, where file names were only allowed to be 8 characters long, and the extension was only allowed to be a dot followed by three characters (aka: the "eight-dot-three" file naming convention).

Like, if someone generated several thousand files, all named: "New Text Document.txt"

In the background, some versions of Windows will also record an alternate file name for ye olde backwards compatibility, such as:

NEWTEX~1.TXT

NEWTE~10.TXT

NEWT~100.TXT

NEW~1000.TXT

NE~10000.TXT

N~100000.TXT

It's not really about the space characters, so much as it is about length constraints from back when 640KB should've been more memory than anyone will ever need.

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