Re: [Gnu-arch-users] ANNOUNCE: Spaces in filenames, finished

[Mikhael Goikhman]

[I know that at least one my message from 12 Mar is not delivered yet.]

On 14 Mar 2004 20:01:33 +0100, address@hidden wrote:
> 
> The 'escaping' support is finished and a release is available at:
> 
[...]

> tla uses (pika) escaped filenames from now on. For every command which
> spits out informationm uses escaping by default too! Many (if not all)
> commands have a --unescaped option to turn escaping for information on
> the console off (please notify me if I missed something).
> The changes are backward compatible and only new archives which contain
> files which wheren't allowed before will confuse older tla versions.
> ChangLogs are always escaped, that can't be turned off.

Someone already noted, the choice of the backslash character seems very
unfortunate. Backslash is already handled specially by almost all tools
and languages. This may open another endless wave of complains.

Would any other rare character be better for this purpose? Some
candidates are ':', ';', '?', '%', '#', '^', '*'. All characters probably
have one or another problem, but IMHO the problem with backslash is
inherently higher. One more thing to think about is this proprietary OS
uses backslash as the directory delimiter.

Do you see any problem with '%' or '#'?  This would be %(sp) or #(sp).
It is still possible to escape the escape char itself, like #(sharp).

If there is an interest, I may produce some statistics showing the number
of existing projects using these rare characters in the file names.

> If you use scripting languages: there is a new 'escape' command to help
> the whimps who can't call the Hackerlab functions
> 
> > echo "$(tla escape "foo bar")"
> foo\(sp)bar
> 
> > echo "$(tla escape --unescaped "foo\\(sp)bar")"
> foo bar

This option name sounds like it is the input that is unescaped.
I think, --unescape and --escape are better names to refer to the output.

Regards,
Mikhael.