On Tuesday 07 November 2006 09:58, Darryl Gregorash wrote:
On 2006-11-07 09:46, Randall R Schulz wrote:
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<snip> Nonetheless, my point was that if you have a character such as an en-space (or it's fatter sibling, em-space, which is the width of a lower-case 'm'), it can be expanded unquoted in an argument list without the en-space causing a break in the argument as a regular space would.
In this instance, we are talking about filenames that clearly have regular spaces as part of their filenames, so I don't see how speaking of en- or em-spaces is relevant. I don't believe there is any way a regular space could be translated to any other kind of space just as part of any glob processing.
Non-ASCII space characters are the only hypothesis that explains this: On Monday 06 November 2006 21:11, Lucky Leavell wrote:
for i in *.mp3 do echo $i mp32ogg $i done
whch works fine if the only craziness is embedded spaces in the file name; it failed when there were parentheses but, since that is rare in my situation, I can live with it. (Of course, if the single quoted $i would work there ... I'm off to try it!)
If that "works fine" with "embedded spaces," then those spaces must not be ASCII spaces (040 / 0x20) but instead something like an en- or em-space. Furthermore, of all the contexts in which non-ASCII spaces might show up, coming from a media source such as a CD or music download seems more plausible than someone typing them at a terminal or even a GUI application (I had to open an HTML editor, enter the HTML entity names, switch to the WYSIWYG mode and copy the characters to get them, since I don't know all the extended compose codes for inputting them via the keyboard).
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Did someone say the bash commandline isn't interesting and fun? :-)
I think so. I do tons of BASH programming.
Fortunately for you, I do not do all that much, or you might suddenly find your inbox full of messages starting "Help, I cannot figure out what this thing is doing...." :-)
I'm happy to answer questions, but please, post them here. Randall Schulz