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Comment by FreakyT | Hacker News Reader

I never understood why this hasn't been modernized. The three-letter nearly-meaningless directory names seem so obsolete.

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Long path names are an annoyance everywhere, from the commandline to the file browser. Use long names where appropriate ('aunt sally photos 2011' is better than 'asp11'), but for the dozen things in the root directory, there's not much effort involved.

I gather you're also not versed in the unix command line? Piping and redirecting long dir paths thru commands and arguments welcomes everything abbreviated. The mnemonics is just engineered happiness sugar-on-top of all the intrinsic greatness.

They are easy to type and do have meaning in and of themselves.

> [...] have meaning in and of themselves.

Mostly because of long usage.

Unless your ssh'd into a machine, it's annoying to type long dir's. What's worse is compensating for spaces in filenames.

Thats what tab completion is for.

Thank you freework, didn't know about that one (embarrassing as it is to admit).

Still sucks dealing with spaces when it comes to command processes like ffmpeg -i <no_tab>...but awesome for cd'ing or ls'ing!

Just prefix the space with a backslash. Eg: ``$ ls /foo/bar/my\ directory/``. With that backslash in place, you can continue your tab-completion.

Still, on some international keyboards, backspace is hard to reach, eg. on a German Mac keyboard, is it <alt><shift>7.

So don't put spaces in path names, it's a bitch to work with.

You can quote the space:

    mkdir x\ y
    cd x' 'y

(or the entire part: cd 'x y')

Yup, that's what I do too, or %20 if its a url

Unix/Linux/whatever should have just forbidden spaces in filenames in the first place since none of the basic tools make it easy iterate over a list of filenames with spaces correctly.

At least UNIX doesn't have a space in the path of the main programs directory (I'm looking at you Windows).

Also, many of the basic tools have a -0 option which uses the null character to replace many uses of space. Still far from an adequate solution though.

Ohh yeah! This is where my initial frustrations have always been for spaces...mounting an NTFS-3G or URL encodings.

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