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000049_icon-group-sender _Mon Jun 1 16:29:41 1998.msg
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Date: Mon, 01 Jun 98 18:53:29 -0400
Message-Id: <9806012253.AA0156@valinet.com>
From: Paul Abrahams <abrahams@acm.org>
To: jeffery@cs.utsa.edu
Cc: abrahams@acm.org, icon-group@optima.CS.Arizona.EDU
In-Reply-To: <199806012211.RAA06897@segfault.cs.utsa.edu> (message from
Clinton Jeffery on Mon, 1 Jun 1998 17:11:58 -0500)
Subject: Re: Annoying things
Reply-To: abrahams@acm.org
Errors-To: icon-group-errors@optima.CS.Arizona.EDU
Status: RO
Content-Length: 1062
>>>>> On Mon, 1 Jun 1998 17:11:58 -0500, Clinton Jeffery <jeffery@segfault.cs.utsa.edu> said:
|Paul> Given the variances among operating systems, perhaps there ought
|Paul> to be a convention that the first space-delimited item in each
|Paul> line produced by open(dirname) is the filename.
|Clint> This is not a bad suggestion. Certainly the format of the
|Clint> string should follow conventions that preserve portability.
|Clint> Some operating systems (Macintosh, and recent versions of
|Clint> Windows) allow spaces in filenames!
I care less about what the convention is than that there be one. You're
right, of course, about the space-in-file-names issue, but that can be
an issue even in making sense of the returned value within a single OS
context. Quoting the filename is one solution, although even that isn't
adequate if filenames can contain quotes. The two alternatives that
come to mind that are completely general are (a) using quotes, with
internal quotes doubled, and (b) using backslashes to quote the next
character.
Paul Abrahams