On Thu, Mar 11, 2021 at 07:48:14AM -0500, Greg Wooledge wrote: > On Thu, Mar 11, 2021 at 10:24:25AM +0100, tomas@tuxteam.de wrote: > > And oh, please: drop those whitespaces off file and directory names. This > > makes teaching shell scripting to newbies a really #@%*&$¡~ chore. Unless > > you want newbies to not learn scripting [1]. > > > > Cheers > > > > [1] The generic "you". You (this time the personal) are the last person > > I would suspect of this! > > On the other hand, newbies who fail to learn proper shell scripting > practices go on to write terrible, horrible, bug-ridden shell scripts > that get installed on your[1] computer, and then break. You're right, and then... I wasn't proposing to ignore the problems with those whitespaces. Rather to just push the steep part of the ramp a bit further down the learning path. I still do one-off scripts without getting every nook and cranny of quoting right. When I rework scripts for possible consumption by others, I put much more attention in it. > The notion that "all filenames are alphanumeric plus dots, and maybe > dashes or underscores if you're a rebel" leads to scripts that break > when given the more typical messy filenames that one encounters in > real life. Sure, it's easy to write those scripts, but they're not > correct. They're ticking bombs. Definitely. And pages like yours do an invaluable job in helping people to refine those skills. But I insist: taking everything into account when starting shell programming can build up to be an insurmountable wall. Perhaps I'm wrong, though. Cheers - t
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