> Jim Henderson <nos### [at] nospamcom> wrote:
>>> For what it's worth, most *nix shells and comand line utilities also
>>> have a conniption when it comes to spaces in file names.
>
>> Not if you properly escape them or put the filename in quotes.  That's a
>> pretty standard practice.
>
> When specifying file names on the command line using wildcards, the shell
> will pass file names with spaces in them to the program appropriately.
>
> In shell scripts, however, special care has to be taken to not make
> command-line parameters (or even files retrieved using eg. file name
> patterns) with spaces in them break the script.
>
> A very common mistake is to write $* in the script to get all the command
> line parameters. This will break it for parameters with spaces in them,
> as the command where that expansion is used will see them as separate
> parameters. The syntax for doing that properly is "$@".
>
> You see this mistake being made all the time, even within high-profile
> programs and tools that should know better.
>
Bingo!

If you remember, a few months ago, I was ranting about a very expensive 
commercial network monitoring software suite that specifically mentioned 
NOT using spaces in directory names for exactly that reason.

Unfortunately the Windows port of that software suite is installed under 
C:\Program files, so they require that the disk have short file names 
enabled, so that they can use C:\PROGRA~1 instead.

-- 
/*Francois Labreque*/#local a=x+y;#local b=x+a;#local c=a+b;#macro P(F//
/*    flabreque    */L)polygon{5,F,F+z,L+z,L,F pigment{rgb 9}}#end union
/*        @        */{P(0,a)P(a,b)P(b,c)P(2*a,2*b)P(2*b,b+c)P(b+c,<2,3>)
/*   gmail.com     */}camera{orthographic location<6,1.25,-6>look_at a }

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