smells like skill issue tbh
tools which cant handle being installed/run on directories with spaces are so annoying
this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2025
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tools which cant handle being installed/run on directories with spaces are unacceptably common
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, skipmy→ 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.
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“_” to the rescue
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"
That's what backslash-tab is for
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.
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whitespaceIsTheEnemy
at least you/arent/using\ linux
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