Filenames with spaces are problematic and I avoid if I can. Not sure if this change would have prevented a problem from the past.
In the days of MBnet(early 1990s) one of the sysadmins wrote a script to clean out /tmp. It was successfully running for a few weeks but one weekend the system crashed with most of the file system deleted. Of course I initially thought we were hacked but could find no evidence of it. Next weekend the same thing happened. At this point I called for help and we had all of the Unix support people on the Eng 6th floor in trying to figured it out. Gary Mills finally discovered a rm command in a memory dump. It was removing directories/files under /tmp/.. which of course is /. He realised what was happening. Because we had disk quotas a user created a directory with the name '/tmp/ ..' to save their files. If you did an ls on /tmp you would see a .. file with a leading space which was of course was misleading. If that filename was enclosed with quotes it would have been easily identified and also perhaps the script to clean up /tmp would not have failed.
-- Bill
On 2017-02-04 12:47 AM, Trevor Cordes wrote:
Fedora 24 (and all cutting-edge distros) has a nice surprise:
touch filenospace touch file\ with\ spaces /bin/ls
'file with spaces' filenospace