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I_fucking_hate_them_now (media.piefed.world)

submitted 4 weeks ago by cm0002@piefed.world to c/programmer_humor@programming.dev

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[-] lucg@lemmy.world 8 points 4 weeks ago

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

[-] BatmanAoD@programming.dev 7 points 4 weeks ago

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.

[-] lucg@lemmy.world 2 points 4 weeks ago

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