Re: Quoting special characters (was: Re: Possible solution for special characters in makefile paths)

[Frank Heckenbach]

David A. Wheeler wrote:

> > > > Assume there are two files, "foo bar" and "ba\z qu'x". What
> > > > does/should happen here?
> > >
> > > $wildcard could return «foo\ bar ba\\z\ qu\'x» (without the outer
> > > quotes) or some such.
> 
> Another approach is for it to return
> «foo barTABba\z qu'x» where TAB is the \t character.
> The TAB character is also permitted in most Unix-like filesystems,
> but practically no one except attackers actually USES this functionality.
> This approach is not tied to any particular shell scripting syntax, and
> it means that the individual filenames are pristine.

But variables don't contain only filenames (and make has no way to
even know in many cases what a variable's contents are meant to be).
Other strings stored in variables may easily contain tabs, most
obviously perhaps ... makefile fragments (consider define...endef).

Besides, I don't see how TAB is better than a rarer control
character. (I suggested 1-6 and 16-25 as candidates, Paul's original
proposal also used 1.) As soon as we do something like this, make
needs to en-/decode, and that's the same amount of work with TAB or
another character.