std.path.getName(): Screwy by design?

[Nick Sabalausky]

"Daniel Gibson" <metalcaedes at gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:ikivql$mbh$1 at digitalmars.com...
> Am 01.03.2011 14:50, schrieb Nick Sabalausky:
>> "Steven Schveighoffer"<schveiguy at yahoo.com>  wrote in message
>> news:op.vrn2pooteav7ka at steve-laptop...
>>> On Tue, 01 Mar 2011 08:13:33 -0500, Lars T. Kyllingstad
>>> <public at kyllingen.nospamnet>  wrote:
>>>
>>>> On Tue, 01 Mar 2011 08:02:44 -0500, Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> On Tue, 01 Mar 2011 04:16:36 -0500, Jonathan M Davis
>>>>> <jmdavisProg at gmx.com>  wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> I can understand if the path stuff
>>>>>> can't deal with / or \ in file names (that's probably not worth 
>>>>>> trying
>>>>>> to get to
>>>>>> work right), but it _should_ be able to handle directories with dots 
>>>>>> in
>>>>>> them and
>>>>>> files with no extension.
>>>>>
>>>>> / and \ are not legal in names on any filesystem that I know of.
>>>>>
>>>>> -Steve
>>>>
>>>> On a *NIX machine, try
>>>>
>>>>    touch "c:\\foo\\bar"
>>>>
>>>> You may be surprised. ;)
>>>
>>> bleh... that seems useless :)  I purposely checked FAT before posting,
>>> because I was sure Unix disallowed backslashes, I wanted to make sure 
>>> FAT
>>> didn't allow slashes.
>>>
>>> Holy crap, something that DOS got right and Unix didn't!
>>
>> Windows also handles files/paths with spaces a hell of a lot better than
>> Unix. This, despite the fact that Unix technically allowed them long 
>> before
>> Windows did. (I don't mean this as OS-bashing.)
>>
>
> It does? In what ways? In Unix you just have to escape spaces with 
> backslashes or put the filename in "" and you're done (bash autocompletion 
> does this). Don't think it's much simpler in Windows.
> Filebrowsers (GUI or midnight commander etc) don't have any problems with 
> spaces either.
>

There's a long, seemingly-unending history of unix programs choking on paths 
with spaces in them *even* when you give them the paths properly escaped. 
Not all unix apps, but enough. I suppose maybe my experience or memory on 
this is skewed, but I can't remember that ever happening to me on windows 
except for apps that were ported from unix. Maybe things have changed within 
the last few years, but try taking the source tree for some large unix 
program, sticking it in a directory that has a space in the name, and 
compiling it from there. I've had problems with that.

I think the main source of trouble is apps failing to properly escape spaces 
when they, for instance, generate a script that acts on specific files or 
when they send the filenames to another app via the commandline.