POV-Ray : Newsgroups : povray.general : Re: file names (Macintosh, Unix?,...) : Re: file names (Macintosh, Unix?,...) Server Time
12 Aug 2024 19:32:28 EDT (-0400)
  Re: file names (Macintosh, Unix?,...)  
From: Thorsten Froehlich
Date: 13 Jan 1999 22:16:39
Message: <369d6197.0@news.povray.org>
In article <369ceb04.0@news.povray.org> , "Johannes Hubert" <jhu### [at] algonetse>
wrote:

>I don't know about this "bug" and it's fix, I am just curious:
>
>Regardless of if the OS allows a leading space or not: Why would anyone in
>his right mind would want to use a leading space in a filename? This looks
>to me like inviting problems in more areas than only POV-ray - even if the
>OS handles the filenames correctly, humans will *very* easily make mistakes
>because it will be so easy to miss the leading space.
>Seems just as bad a practice to me as using *several* leading spaces
>(imagine, with a proportional font, the fun of "guessing" how many spaces
>you have to type to replicate a filename! ;-) or even worse: one or several
>*trailing* spaces (and no ".*" fileextension of course, which could spoil
>the fun of guessing the number of trailing spaces!)
>
>Well, as said, I am curious. After all, there may be valid reasons... Any
>suggestions?

Just a short technical explaination: Macs don't use pathes to find a unique file. And
spaces are only the tip of the iceberg...Macs allow volumes with the same name...each
volume has an unique ID, so it is no problems...and some users like spaces etc.  For
example spaces in front move (if sorted) the filename to the top.

So the answer should be: As users are allowed to name their files this way
programmers *have to* support it. Actually, this is no problem for Mac OS
applications as long as they don't need path based standard C lib file IO.    And
there is no perfect solution for this :-(


    Thorsten


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