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
Generally if you are pasting file paths there is a better way to do that. Use find with exec, or xargs, or a for loop. Or, get the list in Vim and escape (quote) every line at once. Unless you have double quotes in the filename too (which is actually a crazy thing) it shouldn’t be a big deal.
Expansion matters because using parameters without quotes automatically splits words, and IIRC a quoted array parameter can still be split into its members — as opposed to Zsh, where word splitting doesn’t happen unprompted and quoted array parameters are flattened into a single string.
Generally if I want to run $HOME/random executable with spaces.exe through Wine in a terminal I copy the path in Dolphin (CTRL+SHIFT+C, or CTRL+ALT+C idr) and paste it, within quotes if needed (the four extra key inputs are the annoying part).
I find that much faster than manually typing find "$HOME" -name "random executable with spaces.exe" -type x -exec wine "{}" \;, or opening an editor to insert backslashes.
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
Example of how parameter expansion matters?
Generally if you are pasting file paths there is a better way to do that. Use find with exec, or xargs, or a for loop. Or, get the list in Vim and escape (quote) every line at once. Unless you have double quotes in the filename too (which is actually a crazy thing) it shouldn’t be a big deal.
Expansion matters because using parameters without quotes automatically splits words, and IIRC a quoted array parameter can still be split into its members — as opposed to Zsh, where word splitting doesn’t happen unprompted and quoted array parameters are flattened into a single string.
Generally if I want to run
$HOME/random executable with spaces.exethrough Wine in a terminal I copy the path in Dolphin (CTRL+SHIFT+C, or CTRL+ALT+C idr) and paste it, within quotes if needed (the four extra key inputs are the annoying part).I find that much faster than manually typing
find "$HOME" -name "random executable with spaces.exe" -type x -exec wine "{}" \;, or opening an editor to insert backslashes.Why on earth not just type
wine ~/randomand then hit tab to autocomplete? Or you could dowine `echo random*`AFAIK, if $file is a filename with spaces, then
some_util ${file}will not split the filename.