Microsoft intentionally made programs install to C:\Program Files on Windows 95+ to force programmers to deal with spaces in filenames.
Someone make one of those “statements made by the utterly deranged” memes about it, please and thank you.
what is even more funny about this is that the name of that directory used to be locale-dependent, so in sweden it was just called “Program”, completely nullifying that idea.
No this is just clever
Now I use lowercase and underscores everywhere.
I’ve recently learned that in Linux, you can use emois in filenames. I died a
littlelot inside when I learned that.On Linux file systems you can use any character except NULL, and / is a reserved character.
E.g. on ext-4 “All characters and character sequences permitted, except for NULL (‘\0’), ‘/’, and the special file names “.” and “…” which are reserved for indicating (respectively) current and parent directories.”
I once accidentally created a file with a newline character in it… it was pretty tricky to fix from command line.
Arrest this person
This is why you shouldn’t parse
ls
output btw. Usefind
andread
instead
I actually did this a lot on classic Mac OS. Intentionally.
The reason was that you could put a carriage return as the first character of a file, and it would sort above everything else by name while otherwise being invisible. You just had to copy the carriage return from a text editor and then paste it into the rename field in the Finder.
Since OS X / macOS can still read classic Mac HFS+ volumes, you can indeed still have carriage returns in file names on modern Macs. I don’t think you can create them on modern macOS, though. At least not in the Finder or with common Terminal commands.
I don’t conduct interviews very often, but when I do, one of my questions is always about interacting with files that have special characters in the filename.
So … is allowed, or all whitespace, or Zalgo text.
I mean, on the one hand, I guess why be restrictive, but on the other I feel like requiring something that looks like language somehow might be a good idea to avoid edge cases and attacks.
You can have new lines in your file names. YSAP has a good video/playlist about how to deal with these and many more.
In filenames? AMATEURS! Use obscure Unicode in your passphrases for maximum security. Ctrl-Shift-U, enter arbitrary code point, bam! 🦊 Works even better with a Compose key and a nice, chonky
.XCompose
file to throw some gr∑∑k letters around, for instance, like some confused script kiddie. :)On topic: There are multiple variants of spaces in Unicode. You’re welcome, and now go and create something utterly deranged with that information.
иnteresting_idéa_lål.ㅅㅇ
You can use emojis for variable names in swift code.
I’m just gonna pretend I didn’t hear that.
10 seconds of googling indicates this is true for Windows and Mac as well. I haven’t looked specifically, but I’d be a little surprised if it wasn’t true for Android and iOS as well.
But really, why would they add rules to prevent people from using certain unicode codepoints in filenames? Should they disallow Klingon as well? Kanji? Of course not. Emojis are codepoints just like U+0061 is.
Of course there are good reasons to disallow things like newlines and forward slashes in Linux filenames, but what specifically would even be the argument for preventing emojis?
I think that may be possible for every filesystem supporting UTF-8 encoding.
⏰️.🪵
ChatGPT is taking notes
I have been using emoji in macOS for many years. It can be very useful to tag files.
That’s what backslash-tab is for
Oh\ come\ on,\ it\'s\ not\ that\ bad
Some shells enclose those types of files within inverted commas. Such that:
> ls file\ name.md
is instead
> ls 'file name.md'
(I use fish)
“inverted commas”? single quotes?
Yes, I am a weird english.
What is the Old Continent name of those: `
Floating commas
I tried to pause the first one but got all confused because there’s no closing single quote.
Windows is stupid as shit, trying to shift+right click > open Powershell in a path containing a space results in it throwing an error, and you have to paste the path in yourself anyway
Are you typing the whole filename by hand? Tab expansion exists, you know?
If it fucking works…
Sometimes it does. But not always.
Zsh changed my life, but I still hate escape chars in my command lines for readability reasons
I love emoji filenames
i think i am old. i grew up using DOS, and really hated spaces in filenames and folders because they appreared truncated at the first space with a tilde and index of that file/folder representation.
ex: C:\folder name is bad\ == C:\folder~1
i hated that so much that when i got to windows 3.1 i refrained from using spaces (some command line was still necessary in w3.1)
i have jept that habit through the years, so when i moved from windoes to linux, my natural instincts of snake_case_folder_names made it so i didnt have to change : D
That’s not even DOS I think. As far as I know Win 95 came up with this monstrosity in an attempt to circumvent the 8.3 character limitations present in older versions of DOS.
I think you’re misremembering a little. Long filenames was introduced in Win95.
i think i am old
If your code is written well, it shouldn’t matter.
They’re annoying to deal with when interactively using command-line shells, especially so when pasting unquoted and unescaped file paths, doubly especially so with Bash where parameter expansion makes no goddamn sense if you know at least one other programming language
I’m a big fan of PascalCase. ThisIsAGreatFilename.odt
Rust made me have an habit of using snake_case… .rs
" is your friend
Yep, exactly. And tab. \<space> is weird at first but makes sense if you think about it