I_fucking_hate_them

Microsoft intentionally made programs install to C:\Program Files on Windows 95+ to force programmers to deal with spaces in filenames.

Someone make one of those "statements made by the utterly deranged" memes about it, please and thank you.

what is even more funny about this is that the name of that directory used to be locale-dependent, so in sweden it was just called "Program", completely nullifying that idea.
- C:\Program Files
  C:\Program Files (x86)
  C:\ProgramData
- It's only localised in the file explorer. The actual folder name is always Program Files.
No this is just clever
Given even what little I know of their history and what they are doing now, I cannot be sure this wasn't the intention at least partially

I\ don't\ know\ what\ you\ mean,\ I've\ never\ encountered\ any\ annoyances.

'I don't know what you mean, I've never encountered any annoyances.'
- Single quotes don't allow any escaping in shell, you need
  
  'I don'\''t know what you mean, I'\''ve never encountered any annoyances'
  Or, in Zsh with setopt rcquotes:
  
  'I don''t know what you mean, I''ve never encountered any annoyances'

Can't relate. I use shell all the time, and I always use spaces in file paths, especially to make sure scripts I make still work then

I've recently learned that in Linux, you can use emois in filenames. I died a ~~little~~ lot inside when I learned that.

On Linux file systems you can use any character except NULL, and / is a reserved character.
E.g. on ext-4 "All characters and character sequences permitted, except for NULL ('\0'), '/', and the special file names "." and ".." which are reserved for indicating (respectively) current and parent directories."
- I once accidentally created a file with a newline character in it... it was pretty tricky to fix from command line.
- So ... is allowed, or all whitespace, or Zalgo text.
  I mean, on the one hand, I guess why be restrictive, but on the other I feel like requiring something that looks like language somehow might be a good idea to avoid edge cases and attacks.
In filenames? AMATEURS! Use obscure Unicode in your passphrases for maximum security. Ctrl-Shift-U, enter arbitrary code point, bam! 🦊 Works even better with a Compose key and a nice, chonky .XCompose file to throw some gr∑∑k letters around, for instance, like some confused script kiddie. :)
On topic: There are multiple variants of spaces in Unicode. You're welcome, and now go and create something utterly deranged with that information.
- Some grSSk letters?
- I already deal far too much with trying to handle dumb fucking typos in employee data, and trying to turn human names into valid email addresses.
  The first time I encounter something like this there will be a body. It will not be found.
- иnteresting_idéa_lål.ㅅㅇ
- This needs more upvotes. Chaos gods smile at you, and I thank you
unix filenames are just string of bytes, the operating system does not interpret it in anyway. this is a much saner approach compared to Windows where language settings can change file system behavior.
- the operating system does not interpret it in anyway.
  *in any_way. ;)
I'm just gonna pretend I didn't hear that.
⏰️.🪵
ChatGPT is taking notes
10 seconds of googling indicates this is true for Windows and Mac as well. I haven't looked specifically, but I'd be a little surprised if it wasn't true for Android and iOS as well.
But really, why would they add rules to prevent people from using certain unicode codepoints in filenames? Should they disallow Klingon as well? Kanji? Of course not. Emojis are codepoints just like U+0061 is.
Of course there are good reasons to disallow things like newlines and forward slashes in Linux filenames, but what specifically would even be the argument for preventing emojis?
You can, but I downloaded some music the other day and I was trying to put the files onto my phone using KDE Connect, and I couldn't understand why is wasn't working until I got rid of the star emoji in the filenames. So I think Graphene/Android might still struggle with it.
- Lol, I think that's how I learned it was possible, too. yt-dlp uses the title as the filename, and all of the emojis came along with it. Was trying to rename them from terminal, but couldn't do much when half the filenames started with the fire emoji lol.
It's all just Unicode
You can have emoji as your WiFi network name too
Kinda interesting to see what older devices do when faced with such a network
- What about an emoji only wifi password?
Same for Windows (11): I just renamed a file to an apple emoji
I think that may be possible for every filesystem supporting UTF-8 encoding.
You can use emojis for variable names in swift code.
I have been using emoji in macOS for many years. It can be very useful to tag files.

I very intentionally have all my code in Personal Projects 🥰 and Work Projects 🏦 directories so I can find bugs in the handling of file paths.

not sure why the default behavior is this:

file\ name\ with\ a\ bunch\ of\ spaces

instead of this:

"file name with a bunch of spaces"

but you can just press " before pressing tab to auto-complete, and it will use the 2nd form

Because quoting requires token expansion (e.g. ~ to /home/you). Escaping gives you a much shorter path in that case.
That said I'm with you, full quoted paths read better to me.

My work has me working with Matlab Simulink paths, which may (and sometimes actually do) contain newlines.

i y'all just started using fish shell, you'd have proper shell completions and argument splitting that doesn't care about spaces in file names

Are you typing the whole filename by hand? Tab expansion exists, you know?

If it fucking works...
Sometimes it does. But not always.
- Zsh changed my life, but I still hate escape chars in my command lines for readability reasons

at least you/arent/using\ linux

Now I use lowercase and underscores everywhere.

Hyphens > underscores for filenames because all web standards prefer hyphens so if you ever want to network your files its a much smoother experience!
- This is what I need, an explicit reason that makes one choice better than another. If hyphens make for a smoother experience, then I'll reconsider my default behavior.
  Thanks for pointing out this benefit.
- They suck hard. I use the renpy engine and there you reference file names directly but always lower case and spaces and hyphens turn to underscores. That can cause issues, so I just do underscores in my file names. Don't give damn about the web.
This is the best for tab completion, altho I prefer hyphens visually
I prefer lowercase with hyphens, but I'm transitioning into a team that does everything camelCase, which is the second best case, but I still strongly dislike it.

the struggle between spaces in filenames look cute and oh fuck what's the code to reference a space in a filename in terminal?

Just put the whole thing in quotes. You might have to escape extra sets of quotes, usually with a backslash.
- Or you can also put a \ in front of the space
- If you intend on using that with tab completions, you will have extra work to do.

I still use spaces

agreed, "still worth it"
I do, however, tend to keep spaces out of my folder names so i can just use quotes at the end.
/Images/Halloween/Projections/"Creepy Crawlies.mp4"

Computers should just know when I want a space to be part of a file name, and when I want them to be argument separators. No more escaping or quoting.

i think i am old. i grew up using DOS, and really hated spaces in filenames and folders because they appreared truncated at the first space with a tilde and index of that file/folder representation.

ex: C:\folder name is bad\ == C:\folder1

i hated that so much that when i got to windows 3.1 i refrained from using spaces (some command line was still necessary in w3.1)

i have jept that habit through the years, so when i moved from windoes to linux, my natural instincts of snake_case_folder_names made it so i didnt have to change : D

That's not even DOS I think. As far as I know Win 95 came up with this monstrosity in an attempt to circumvent the 8.3 character limitations present in older versions of DOS.
One of the fun things about modern Windows is that ~1 shit still appears every once in a rare while. Gotta love just stacking more and more shit on top of ancient systems in the name of backwards compatibility!
I think you're misremembering a little. Long filenames was introduced in Win95.
Yea, Win 3.1 didn't support long names - that came with Win95. Win 3.1 was a shell on DOS.
But I understand - it all blends together after um... 40 years (ouch!).
i think i am old
https://youtube.com/watch?v=UzqcNlhaqIY

Don't try svelte kit. This is pseudocode but it's valid. The only symbol show here that is not real is the / that I've placed at the end of folder to show that they are folders. There are other special cases

    
routes/
+page.ts
(admin)/
  +page.ts
  [user=uuid]/
    [[community]]/
      +page.ts
    posts/
      [...postIds@]/
        +page.ts

sveltekit is beautiful (thanks for spreading the word)
- Im trying it out yet. It seems fun, the tutorial is amazing. I don't think I'd want to do large enterprise projects with it

smells like skill issue tbh

tools which cant handle being installed/run on directories with spaces are so annoying

tools which cant handle being installed/run on directories with spaces are unacceptably common
You are clearly not a command line user :)
- I vaguely remember zsh in Manjaro (by default) having a tab completion that automatically added the slashes.
  Never set it up myself though.
  But I really hate having to worry about quoting my file variables in scripts.
  So much, that after a certain complexity, I just give up the script and make the thing in C++.
  Oh, and if I make a script that doesn't handle file names properly (because it's not required in that specific use case), I make sure to delete it after use, to prevent mistaken use later, which would otherwise cause more headache than just having to rewrite a script.

" is your friend

Yep, exactly. And tab.
<space>
is weird at first but makes sense if you think about it

I'm a big fan of PascalCase. ThisIsAGreatFilename.odt

Rust made me have an habit of using snake_case... .rs

Windows is stupid as shit, trying to shift+right click > open Powershell in a path containing a space results in it throwing an error, and you have to paste the path in yourself anyway

If your code is written well, it shouldn’t matter.

They're annoying to deal with when interactively using command-line shells, especially so when pasting unquoted and unescaped file paths, doubly especially so with Bash where parameter expansion makes no goddamn sense if you know at least one other programming language
- Example of how parameter expansion matters?
  Generally if you are pasting file paths there is a better way to do that. Use find with exec, or xargs, or a for loop. Or, get the list in Vim and escape (quote) every line at once. Unless you have double quotes in the filename too (which is actually a crazy thing) it shouldn’t be a big deal.

“_” to the rescue

Now I'm imagining a shell that looks iteratively through arguments to find where quotes would make total sense

    
$ ls
my victims.ods
$ wipe -f my victims.ods --thorough

So the shell would go like

wipe → command name found, ok
-f → no file in the current directory starts with that, skip
my → matches a file, keep in memory...
my victims.ods → full match, but missing quotes!
Prompt user:

    
Filename "my victims.ods" found without quotes. Choose:
[a]dd quotes this time
[A]lways add quotes (dangerous)
[n]o quotes today please
[N]ever offer adding quotes again
[t]ell me what could possibly go wrong when I choose to always add quotes
[P]unch the person who proposed this feature

For interactive use, tab-completion essentially makes this a non-issue, because shells add escaping in the appropriate places.
For scripting, where spaces are harder to deal with, unfortunately there's just not much you can do; your two options are basically to learn all of your particular shell's patterns for dealing with whitespace in filenames, or only write scripts in something other than a POSIX shell.
- Scripting isn't the issue, but for tab completion: the boundary is often at a space or parenthesis so that you need to type the backslash + char to continue tabbing to completion

The number of keystrokes needed to type an underscore is the same that you need to type backslash space, so I don't see how underscores are in improvement

That's what backslash-tab is for

whitespaceIsTheEnemy

Mv /home/"$USER"/Downloads /home/"$USER"/downloads

capital letters.

SameHereBrother.

End each word with a Pretty simple. I just realized lemmy wont show a forward slash.

I love emoji filenames