Now I’m imagining a shell that looks iteratively through arguments to find where quotes would make total sense
$ ls
my victims.ods
$ wipe -f my victims.ods --thorough
So the shell would go like
wipe → command name found, ok
-f → no file in the current directory starts with that, skip
my → matches a file, keep in memory…
my victims.ods → full match, but missing quotes!
Prompt user:
Filename "my victims.ods" found without quotes. Choose:
[a]dd quotes this time
[A]lways addquotes (dangerous)
[n]o quotes today please
[N]ever offer adding quotes again
[t]ell me what could possibly go wrong when I choose to always add quotes
[P]unch the person who proposed this feature
For interactive use, tab-completion essentially makes this a non-issue, because shells add escaping in the appropriate places.
For scripting, where spaces are harder to deal with, unfortunately there’s just not much you can do; your two options are basically to learn all of your particular shell’s patterns for dealing with whitespace in filenames, or only write scripts in something other than a POSIX shell.
Scripting isn’t the issue, but for tab completion: the boundary is often at a space or parenthesis so that you need to type the backslash + char to continue tabbing to completion
Now I’m imagining a shell that looks iteratively through arguments to find where quotes would make total sense
$ ls my victims.ods $ wipe -f my victims.ods --thoroughSo the shell would go like
wipe→ command name found, ok-f→ no file in the current directory starts with that, skipmy→ matches a file, keep in memory…my victims.ods→ full match, but missing quotes!Filename "my victims.ods" found without quotes. Choose: [a]dd quotes this time [A]lways add quotes (dangerous) [n]o quotes today please [N]ever offer adding quotes again [t]ell me what could possibly go wrong when I choose to always add quotes [P]unch the person who proposed this featureFor interactive use, tab-completion essentially makes this a non-issue, because shells add escaping in the appropriate places.
For scripting, where spaces are harder to deal with, unfortunately there’s just not much you can do; your two options are basically to learn all of your particular shell’s patterns for dealing with whitespace in filenames, or only write scripts in something other than a POSIX shell.
Scripting isn’t the issue, but for tab completion: the boundary is often at a space or parenthesis so that you need to type the backslash + char to continue tabbing to completion