Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uwm.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!usc!bbn!bbn.com!levin
From: levin@bbn.com (Joel B Levin)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Filenames, ARGH!!
Keywords: filenames, csh, spam
Message-ID: <51155@bbn.COM>
Date: 19 Jan 90 19:54:07 GMT
References: <591@lectroid.sw.stratus.com>
Sender: news@bbn.COM
Reply-To: levin@BBN.COM (Joel B Levin)
Organization: BBN Communications Corporation
Lines: 21

In article <591@lectroid.sw.stratus.com> lennox@paris.sw.stratus.com (Craig Scott Lennox) writes:
|However, I'm stonewalled atthe beginning:  How can you write an effective
|command interpreter when ANY character -- spaces, tabs, hyphens, underscores,
|colons, etc. can be in your filenames....

Why not do it the way csh, or for that matter, MPW(1), does it?  You
have a limited list of special characters, so require that they only
appear in quoted strings or with a quote-character prefix.  Csh allows
spaces, asterisks, etc. in filenames, too, if you quote them properly.

	/JBL

(1) MPW has a useful additional feature in some of its commands, e.g.
    the equivalent to 'ls': file names containing special characters
    are by default output quoted in '' so you can feed the output into
    another command.

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