9fans archive / 1998 / 04 / 23 /    prev next

From: G. David Butler gdb@dbS...
Subject: [9fans] allowing space (ASCII 0x20) in file names
Date: Wed, 8 Apr 1998 14:58:18 -0500

>From: "Russ Cox" <rsc@pla...>

>not having spaces in the filenames in plan9 is a wonderful
>blessing.

True.

>come to think of it, i think i'd rather have ms-dos filenames than
>have imap.  use import and edmail.  or pop3 | sendmail.

You would also rather use Plan9 instead of ms-dos or NT.  What's
your point?  :-)

>From: "Tom Duff" <td@pix...>

>On Apr 8,  1:08pm, Russ Cox wrote:
>> noticeable one is that it messes up scripts and the like:
>> ls -l | awk '{print $10}' is no longer guaranteed to give
>> you filenames.
>
>Yes, this is certainly the reason.  When I was working on the
[snip]
>Probably rob took the more liberal road of forbidding del, space
>and controls, the first because it is particularly hard to type,
>and the rest because, as Russ noted, they confound the usual
>line- and field-breaking rules.

I agree that it is nice that Plan9 isn't as libral as UNIX in this
regard.

The problem is that the RFC2060 "International Mailbox Naming
Convention" has one more character in its alphabet than Plan9
allows in names so there is no place to map the space.

I guess I could invoke implementation limitations of
"no ASCII space and 27 UTF-8 octets" in names.

-------------------------------------------------------------------
G. David Butler   | Who I? Zathras, a Plan9er. Nobody uses Zathras'
                  | system, but Zathras not mind. Zathras used to 
                  | having others ignore Zathras. Besides, Zathras
gdb@dbS... | have best system, so Zathras happy.