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Date:      Wed, 03 Oct 2001 12:12:23 -0400
From:      Michael Sinz <msinz@wgate.com>
To:        Warner Losh <imp@harmony.village.org>
Cc:        gkshenaut@ucdavis.edu, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: ALT-<sp> (Was: how to make 'for' understand two words as a singleargumen)
Message-ID:  <7ffffcf203a07007d1@[192.168.1.4]>
References:  <200110022357.f92NvnS08486@thistle.bogs.org> <7fffe3770386f507d1@[192.168.1.4]>

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Warner Losh wrote:
> 
> In message <200110022357.f92NvnS08486@thistle.bogs.org> Greg Shenaut writes:
> : But you have to admit, space is a character that has caused many
> : problems in Unix filenames, because of the other Unix tradition of
> : space-delimited word record handling.  I usually use an underscore,
> : myself, if I want a space-like separation in a filename, but I
> : could (and have) used 0xa0 for a similar purpose.
> :
> : Just out of curiosity, what would be an instance where you have
> : wanted a space in a filename and wouldn't have been satisfied with
> : 0xa0 instead of 0x20?
> 
> Where 0xa0 doesn't exist in the local?  To be honest, up until this
> thread I'd never heard of ASCII defining a unbreakable space as 0xa0.
> That's because ASCII doesn't define it (but ISO 8859-1 might).  I also
> have a bad feeling that this might have implications for NFS file
> systems as well where 0xa0 and 0x20 might mean different things to the
> remote host.

And I would hope that we don't get into the mapping of characters in
the filesystem.  Especially when some people read the characters of
a filename and push them through something like shifjis (Japan) and
get something completely different.

BTW - How does your system represent a file with 0xA0 in it?  An ls on
FreeBSD 4.4-Stable seems to show it as:

-rw-r--r--  1 msinz  msinz   0 Oct  3 12:00 foo?bar

Interesting - not what I would have expected but I think "non-printables"
are replaced by the "?" when ls runs.

Even more interesting is this:

-rw-r--r--  1 msinz  msinz   0 Oct  3 12:00 foo?bar
-rw-r--r--  1 msinz  msinz   1 Oct  3 12:05 foo?bar

(one has a linefeed in the name and one has a non-breaking space in the name)

-- 
Michael Sinz ---- Worldgate Communications ---- msinz@wgate.com
A master's secrets are only as good as
	the master's ability to explain them to others.

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