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Comment by curt15 | Hacker News Reader

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curt15·

Didn't Windows name "Program Files" with a space to force application developers to handle spaces in paths properly?

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For the longest time you could get away with this in cmd:

> dir c:\progra~1

So if forcing people to handle spaces was the goal, it took a long time to force it.

I'm pretty sure that still works. I forgot the exact scenario, but my Windows CI on GitHub Actions output shorte~1 pathna~1 like that in a script just a few months ago. On one hand, the backwa~1 compati~1 is nice. On the other hand, there's just so much depreca~1 cruft that keeps popping up even on contemp~1 systems.

In theory yes, in practice to this day many people don't bother how to learn how to deal with pathnames in a proper way.

Top difficulties in computer science:

1. naming things

2. cache coherency

3. off-by-one errors

???

4. quoting pathnames

I would replace 4 with parameter expansion rules.

Eh, maybe. In practice I usually do all my moderately-heavy filesystem scripting in Python these days, for which pathname quoting is just a complete non-issue. Of course, I still use a shell for quick-and-dirty stuff, but usually only for pretty simple tasks where the simplest quoting setup ("$i") suffices.

Not to mention C:\Program Files (x86)

And C:\Programme and other localized variants to force people to go through the proper APIs instead of hardcoding paths.

I just got used to installing things I need to interact with in a program into a folder named C:\workspace

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