Re: MAKECMDGOALS and spaces

[Paul Smith]

On Sat, 2021-02-20 at 09:12 +0200, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> Moreover, file names with spaces are found not only on Windows
> nowadays.  So I guess what you regard as "stupid idea" is for some
> reason picked up by GNU/Linux and other systems (perhaps because
> they lack imagination, and basically copycat every UI idea they find
> on Windows?).

Just to clarify: UNIX systems have supported spaces in filenames since
before the first line of DOS was written; a filename in POSIX has
always been able to contain _any_ character other than slash ("/") and
nul ('\0') and that includes whitespace of all kinds [1].

It's just that no one in the UNIX/POSIX world actually USED filenames
containing these characters because they required quoting, and that was
especially annoying when the only interfaces we had were CLI (without
completion!) and you had to get the quoting right by hand.  Certainly
they were not part of the base OS (like "Program Files") and so many
UNIX tools from that era simply ignored them; a kind of "Dr. it hurts
when I do that" / "Don't do that" situation.

make, unfortunately it turns out, falls into that category for sure.


[1] Whether this is a good thing or not is certainly open for debate.
Definitely it's been a serious, recognized problem for a long time that
some characters (like newlines!!) should really have not been allowed
in filenames, due to security reasons.