Posted by Brent Baisley on 10/14/05 17:46

MSFT allowed spaces? They were behind in allowing spaces (and long
file names) Apple allowed them far before MS, and Unix allowed spaces
far before Apple. Unix just assumes a space is a command/parameter
delimiter first and part of the name second. Just like multiplication
takes precedence over addition unless you use parenthesis, a space
takes precedence as a delimiter unless you use quotes.
Spaces are permitted, underscores just means you don't have to use
quotes to explain what you mean. It's like saying Unix doesn't allow
you to use capitals in the file name because it won't find "filename"
it you type "FileName". It's a feature of a case sensitive file
system available in most forms of Unix. It also caused a lot of
confusion and frustration to people developing web sites under
Windows and posting to a Unix host.

Telling users to use underscores is a work around that works as long
and everyone uses underscores all the time. It's still better to have
knowledge of what's going on and why so when one does encounter a
file name with a space they know how to reference it.

I would say one of the lousiest things MSFT did was reversing the /
to reference paths in DOS.


On Oct 14, 2005, at 9:28 AM, Miles Thompson wrote:

>
> One of the "nice" things MSFT did was to allow spaces in directory
> and file names. It created more work for programmers.
>
> One of the LOUSIEST things MSFT did was allowing spaces in
> directory and file names, because of the needless, tedious parsing
> and checking it requires.
>
> So much simpler to train users that computers are dumb and trip
> over spaces, so just use an underscore where you want to separate
> words. Funny thing, users accept that.
>
> Glad I got that off my chest - Miles
>
> At 10:11 AM 10/14/2005, Brent Baisley wrote:
>
>> In your example, the problem is that the name has spaces, which the
>> shell uses as a delimiter. So "That Won't Move/" is kind of being
>> considered parameters instead of part of the dir. Using the command
>> line (i.e. shell/terminal) will give you more feedback as to what is
>> happening (/some/dir/Dir: No such Directory).
>>
>> You need to either escape the characters or enclose it in quotes. For
>> me, I always find it easier to just enclose directory names in
>> quotes.
>>
>> $source_dir = '"/some/dir/Dir That Won't Move/"';
>>
>>
>> On Oct 12, 2005, at 10:11 PM, -k. wrote:
>>
>>
>>> I'm having trouble moving some directories. My script works fine on
>>> some directories but doesn't
>>> move others. It seems to have trouble with directories with non
>>> alphanumeric charters. I'm running
>>> Red Hat FC2. I'm trying to move the directory basically like this...
>>>
>>> <?Php
>>>
>>> $source_dir = '/some/dir/Dir That Won't Move/';
>>> $dest_dir = '/some/other/dir/'
>>>
>>> $cmd = escapeshellcmd("mv ".$source_dir." ".$dest_dir);
>>> $result = shell_exec($cmd);
>>>
>>> ?>
>>>
>>> Is there some way to escape the characters in the directories? For
>>> example if i put a "\" in front
>>> of blank spaces it takes care of those (same for "'","(" etc.) but
>>> that obviously doesn't take
>>> care of everything. I'm hoping there is something easy i'm
>>> overlooking here that will escape all
>>> the characters.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> -k.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> __________________________________
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>>
>> --
>> Brent Baisley
>> Systems Architect
>> Landover Associates, Inc.
>> Search & Advisory Services for Advanced Technology Environments
>> p: 212.759.6400/800.759.0577
>>
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>> PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/)
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>>
>>
>
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>

--
Brent Baisley
Systems Architect
Landover Associates, Inc.
Search & Advisory Services for Advanced Technology Environments
p: 212.759.6400/800.759.0577

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