ubuntuone-users team mailing list archive

[Carsten Agger <agger@xxxx>]

On Fri, 2009-10-30 at 09:07 -0300, John Rowland Lenton wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 30, 2009 at 06:19:58AM -0400, Carsten Agger wrote:
> > 
> > Spaces in Folder names are a major annoyance when using the command line,
> 
> yes, slightly (but as pointed out, that doesn't necessarily mean it's bad)
> 

I still think they should be avoided, since 

> > and they also break globbing and thus break or complicate a large number
> > of shell scripts.
> 
> how does it break globbing?

Good question! If you want to do something with all files or directories
somewhere, you can do something like this in bash:

$ for FILE in `ls -a` ...

However, if a file name contains spaces, it is parsed as two strings, ie
as two file names:

----------------------------

agger@lakshmi:~$ ls | grep Ubu
Ubuntu One
agger@lakshmi:~$ for file in `ls | grep Ubu`; do echo   $file; done
Ubuntu
One


----------------------------


This breaks a LOT of shell scripts. It's possible to code around this,
of course, but I don't think the system should use such names by
default.

br
Carsten