Re: [ARSCLIST] Underscore in file names

["Daniel G. Epstein" <dan@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Sep 06, 2006 at 10:00:56AM -0700, David Breneman wrote:
> --- "Daniel G. Epstein" <dan@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
> > Obviously, this won't work.  However any of the following will
> > work:
> > 
> >   $ ecaplay 'My Demo CD - Take 1.aiff'
> >   $ ecaplay "My Demo CD - Take 1.aiff"
> >   $ ecaplay My\ Demo\ CD\ -\ Take 1.aiff
> 
> I doubt if you're going to get the freestanding dash
> to work no matter what you do.  It will be interpreted 
> as indicating an argument to the ecaplay command, and
> will result in an error such as "ecaplay: - Take: invalid
> argument."  No matter how you slice it, whitespace in
> file names is just plain A Bad Idea.

Well, I did mistype the above line and leave out a '\'.  It should
read:

   $ ecaplay My\ Demo\ CD\ -\ Take\ 1.aiff

However, the dash isn't actually "free standing" if it is preceeded and
followed by an *escaped* space.  Also, many/most Unix commands will stop
reading '-' as an operator flag after file arguments have been passed
(assuming the file isn't an argument to an operator such as 'tar -cf
file.tar.gz -z').  I don't have ecasound installed on any of the systems
I'm currently able to access, but the above (corrected) examples all
work on both my web server running FreeBSD 4.x and my laptop running
Debian (Sarge) with tools like 'cat' and 'ls'.  Sadly, I don't have a
Mac here either.

That said, I think we both still agree that things are easier w/o spaces
in file names.

Cheers,

Dan

-- 

A boast of "I have beens,"   | Daniel G. Epstein
quoted from foolscap tomes,  | Audio Engineer
is a shadow brushed away     |
by an acorn from an oak tree | Rootlike Technologies, Inc.
or a salmon in a pool.       | http://www.rootlike.com/

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