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I_fucking_hate_them_now (media.piefed.world)
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[-] lemming741@lemmy.world 193 points 2 months ago

Microsoft intentionally made programs install to C:\Program Files on Windows 95+ to force programmers to deal with spaces in filenames.

Someone make one of those "statements made by the utterly deranged" memes about it, please and thank you.

[-] lime@feddit.nu 77 points 2 months ago

what is even more funny about this is that the name of that directory used to be locale-dependent, so in sweden it was just called "Program", completely nullifying that idea.

[-] jjagaimo@sh.itjust.works 59 points 2 months ago

C:\Program Files

C:\Program Files (x86)

C:\ProgramData

[-] BanMe@lemmy.world 44 points 2 months ago

The fucking parenthetical x86 absolutely kills me. I don't normally wish dick cancer on people,

[-] SomethingBurger@jlai.lu 9 points 2 months ago

It's only localised in the file explorer. The actual folder name is always Program Files.

[-] SorryQuick@lemmy.ca 9 points 2 months ago

Only since vista, it used to be localized.

[-] Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 2 months ago

what about placeholders/variables like %localappdata%, %windir%, %programfiles%?

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[-] sexy_peach@feddit.org 33 points 2 months ago

No this is just clever

[-] Shanmugha@lemmy.world 7 points 2 months ago

Given even what little I know of their history and what they are doing now, I cannot be sure this wasn't the intention at least partially

[-] SpaceScotsman@startrek.website 59 points 2 months ago

I\ don\'t\ know\ what\ you\ mean,\ I\'ve\ never\ encountered\ any\ annoyances.

[-] Routhinator@startrek.website 8 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

'I don\'t know what you mean, I\'ve never encountered any annoyances.'

[-] gamma@programming.dev 7 points 2 months ago

Single quotes don't allow any escaping in shell, you need

'I don'\''t know what you mean, I'\''ve never encountered any annoyances'

Or, in Zsh with setopt rcquotes:

'I don''t know what you mean, I''ve never encountered any annoyances'
[-] Routhinator@startrek.website 6 points 2 months ago

Oh right, good catch. That's me shell scripting while in a meeting. 🫠

[-] stefenauris@pawb.social 4 points 2 months ago

Good use of a meeting to be fair

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[-] bleistift2@sopuli.xyz 32 points 2 months ago

Are you typing the whole filename by hand? Tab expansion exists, you know?

[-] Truscape 19 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

If it fucking works...

Sometimes it does. But not always.

[-] kernelle@lemmy.dbzer0.com 13 points 2 months ago

Zsh changed my life, but I still hate escape chars in my command lines for readability reasons

[-] livingcoder@programming.dev 24 points 2 months ago

Now I use lowercase and underscores everywhere.

[-] drmoose@lemmy.world 11 points 2 months ago

Hyphens > underscores for filenames because all web standards prefer hyphens so if you ever want to network your files its a much smoother experience!

[-] livingcoder@programming.dev 5 points 2 months ago

This is what I need, an explicit reason that makes one choice better than another. If hyphens make for a smoother experience, then I'll reconsider my default behavior.

Thanks for pointing out this benefit.

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[-] Anahkiasen 5 points 2 months ago

This is the best for tab completion, altho I prefer hyphens visually

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[-] cupcakezealot@piefed.blahaj.zone 20 points 2 months ago

the struggle between spaces in filenames look cute and oh fuck what's the code to reference a space in a filename in terminal?

[-] kamen@lemmy.world 10 points 2 months ago

Just put the whole thing in quotes. You might have to escape extra sets of quotes, usually with a backslash.

[-] YellowTraveller@lemmy.zip 3 points 2 months ago

Or you can also put a \ in front of the space

[-] AmazingAwesomator@lemmy.world 18 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

i think i am old. i grew up using DOS, and really hated spaces in filenames and folders because they appreared truncated at the first space with a tilde and index of that file/folder representation.

ex: C:\folder name is bad\ == C:\folder~1

i hated that so much that when i got to windows 3.1 i refrained from using spaces (some command line was still necessary in w3.1)

i have jept that habit through the years, so when i moved from windoes to linux, my natural instincts of snake_case_folder_names made it so i didnt have to change : D

[-] aaaaaaaaargh@feddit.org 11 points 2 months ago

That's not even DOS I think. As far as I know Win 95 came up with this monstrosity in an attempt to circumvent the 8.3 character limitations present in older versions of DOS.

[-] db2@lemmy.world 6 points 2 months ago

I think you're misremembering a little. Long filenames was introduced in Win95.

[-] wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 2 months ago

One of the fun things about modern Windows is that ~1 shit still appears every once in a rare while. Gotta love just stacking more and more shit on top of ancient systems in the name of backwards compatibility!

[-] Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe 5 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Yea, Win 3.1 didn't support long names - that came with Win95. Win 3.1 was a shell on DOS.

But I understand - it all blends together after um... 40 years (ouch!).

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[-] callyral@pawb.social 18 points 2 months ago

not sure why the default behavior is this:

file\ name\ with\ a\ bunch\ of\ spaces

instead of this:

"file name with a bunch of spaces"

but you can just press " before pressing tab to auto-complete, and it will use the 2nd form

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[-] lengau@midwest.social 17 points 2 months ago

I very intentionally have all my code in Personal Projects 🥰 and Work Projects 🏦 directories so I can find bugs in the handling of file paths.

[-] ronigami@lemmy.world 15 points 2 months ago

If your code is written well, it shouldn’t matter.

[-] Sonotsugipaa@lemmy.dbzer0.com 19 points 2 months ago

They're annoying to deal with when interactively using command-line shells, especially so when pasting unquoted and unescaped file paths, doubly especially so with Bash where parameter expansion makes no goddamn sense if you know at least one other programming language

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[-] SnotFlickerman 14 points 2 months ago
[-] floquant@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 points 2 months ago

Yep, exactly. And tab. \ is weird at first but makes sense if you think about it

[-] Lyra_Lycan 11 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Windows is stupid as shit, trying to shift+right click > open Powershell in a path containing a space results in it throwing an error, and you have to paste the path in yourself anyway

[-] jbk@discuss.tchncs.de 10 points 2 months ago

smells like skill issue tbh

tools which cant handle being installed/run on directories with spaces are so annoying

[-] vivalapivo@lemmy.today 8 points 2 months ago

tools which cant handle being installed/run on directories with spaces are unacceptably common

[-] nialv7@lemmy.world 4 points 2 months ago

You are clearly not a command line user :)

[-] bob_lemon@feddit.org 10 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

My work has me working with Matlab Simulink paths, which may (and sometimes actually do) contain newlines.

[-] lucg@lemmy.world 8 points 2 months ago

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

  1. wipe → command name found, ok
  2. -f → no file in the current directory starts with that, skip
  3. my → matches a file, keep in memory...
  4. my victims.ods → full match, but missing quotes!
  5. Prompt user:
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 feature
[-] BatmanAoD@programming.dev 7 points 2 months ago

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.

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[-] notarobot@lemmy.zip 8 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Don't try svelte kit. This is pseudocode but it's valid. The only symbol show here that is not real is the / that I've placed at the end of folder to show that they are folders. There are other special cases

routes/
+page.ts
(admin)/
  +page.ts
  [user=uuid]/
    [[community]]/
      +page.ts
    posts/
      [...postIds@]/
        +page.ts
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[-] pineapplelover@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 2 months ago
[-] rumba@lemmy.zip 7 points 2 months ago

agreed, "still worth it"

I do, however, tend to keep spaces out of my folder names so i can just use quotes at the end.

/Images/Halloween/Projections/"Creepy Crawlies.mp4"

[-] bitjunkie@lemmy.world 5 points 2 months ago

That's what backslash-tab is for

[-] brown567@sh.itjust.works 4 points 2 months ago

whitespaceIsTheEnemy

[-] kieron115@startrek.website 4 points 2 months ago

at least you/arent/using\ linux

[-] zerofk@lemmy.zip 4 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Computers should just know when I want a space to be part of a file name, and when I want them to be argument separators. No more escaping or quoting.

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this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2025
981 points (100.0% liked)

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