lemm.ee

5 points

10 months ago

but what does the command line matter for dates? sure every once in a while you’ll have to pass a date as an argument on the command line but I think usually that kind of data is handled by APIs without human intervention, so once these are set up properly, I don’t see the problem

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21 points

10 months ago

rsync -a "somedir" "somedir_backup_$(date)"

If the date command returns an RFC-3339-formatted string, the filename will contain a space. If, for example, you want to iterate over the files using for d in $(find...) and forget to set $IFS properly, it can cause issues.

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lolcatnip@reddthat.com

2 points

10 months ago

But $(date) does return a string with spaces, at least on every system I’ve ever used. And what’s so bad about the possibility of spaces in filenames? They’re slightly inconvenient in a command line, but I haven’t used a commuter this century that didn’t support spaces in filenames.

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4 points

10 months ago

Bro, literally re-read the comment you replied to. It has an example of what might happen.

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lolcatnip@reddthat.com

1 point

10 months ago

Ok, I just reread it. I don’t see what you think I’m missing. You mean an improperly written find command misbehaving? The fact that a different date format could prevent a bug from manifesting doesn’t seem like much of an argument.

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black0ut@pawb.social

2 points

10 months ago

Spaces can exist in filenames. The only problem is that they have to be escaped. As the comment that you reread explained, cat hello world.txt would print the files hello and world.txt. If you wanted to print the file "hello world.txt" you’d either need to quote it (cat "hello world.txt") or escape the space (cat hello\ world.txt)

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lolcatnip@reddthat.com

2 points

10 months ago

Oh, the horror!

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calcopiritus@lemmy.world

1 point

10 months ago

Both arguments are surrounded by ", which should be space-safe.

At least in the shells I use, putting " makes spaces inside paths a non-issue.

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1 point

10 months ago

For the rsync command, yes. But this:

for d in $(find . -type d); do
    echo "$d"
done

will process the space-separated parts of each path as separate items. I had to work around this issue just two days ago, it’s an obscure thing that not everyone will keep in mind.

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-9 points

10 months ago

Hm, I guess I just don’t agree that CLI usablity comes before readability.

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12 points

10 months ago

Again, it’s not just CLI, it’s an insurance against misinterpreted characters breaking programs.

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-4 points

10 months ago

honestly, if a space breaks your program, it’s kind of a shit program.

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2 points

10 months ago

Yeah? I once spent an entire week debugging a plaintext database because the software expected the record identifiers to be tokenized a certain way, but the original data source had spaces in those strings.

The software was the ISC DHCP server, the industry standard for decades and only EOL’d a year ago.

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1 point

10 months ago

Sounds like a weekend that you could have saved if the software was just implemented properly and accepted spaces.

Something being an industry standard does not necessarily mean it’s good. Sometimes it just means it was the cheapest, or sometimes even just because it was used for so long. How long did it take for Torx to somewhat replace philips head screws despite being better in most cases?

I think date strings are made for human and machine readability. Similar to XML or JSON. So, why not improve systems so that we can have more human readable date strings? If you don’t care about human readability and want to make sure there is no confusion with spaces, you can just use epoch timestamps.

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