LinuxSA Mailing list archives

  From: Dale Long <dalel@loftuscomp.com.au>
  To  : Andrew Burrow <alburrow@cs.adelaide.edu.au>
  Date: Tue, 21 Nov 2000 13:04:01 +1030 (CST)

Re: Scripts walking the tree

On Tue, 21 Nov 2000, Andrew Burrow wrote:
> > No I don't.  Unix specifically supports every 8  bit character in filenames
> > except slash ('/') and nul.  Don't blame Windows if your script doesn't
> > handle all of these possibilities.
> 
> Thats not really fair.  It has been discussed in the past, and it is
> true that newlines in filenames are a proper bugger in scripts.  In
> particular, they screw up pipelines.  Or perhaps you have an example
> of a shell script that can grep/sort/uniq/iterate over etc., lists of
> files where some contain newlines.  I have tried to no avail.

I have seen instances where even spaces in Windows filenames are not
handled correctly. The 'lite' install tool supplied with Delphi 4 worked
with a program I wrote nicely (where parameters were passed via an exec to
another program). This worked with Win95, Win98 and broke on Win98se.
The program I wrote should have wrapped the parameter in quotes in teh
first place. The path in the installations prior to 98se were
converted to 8.3 format. The same API call used by the install program
in 98se must have changed. The installer was the same version in all
instances.

I often get the feeling that filenames and the characters they contain are
not handled in a consistant manner through out all Windows APIs (for a
given version of Windows).

Dale.

-- 
LinuxSA WWW: http://www.linuxsa.org.au/  IRC: #linuxsa on irc.linux.org.au
To unsubscribe from the LinuxSA list:
  mail linuxsa-request@linuxsa.org.au with "unsubscribe" as the subject