HUGE sprinking can

Actually, the %20 is the proper way to handle the space character on the web. Most websites accept either but some only accept the one.

-- Bob May Losing weight is easy! If you ever want to lose weight, eat and drink less. Works evevery time it is tried!

Unfortunately DoN Just Can't Handle It :^) (Or more accurately, li/u-nix.)

Tim

-- In the immortal words of Ned Flanders: "No foot longs!" Website @

Must be Paul Bunyan's.

Well ... to be a bit more accurate, unix or linux can handle it, the problem comes when trying to generate the filename on the command line (to look at it with other programs). You see, unix shells use spaces as one of the internal field separators (to separate multiple command-line arguments). The other two are the TAB character and the newline (end-of-line character). To get two words so separated accepted as a single argument, you have three choices:

3) Prefix the space (or other offending character) with a '' to tell the shell "Yes, I know that this is a special character which follows, but just for the moment, pretend that it is just a plain character."

The OS itself only prohibits two characters in filenames, the '/' which separates subdirectory names from filenames (and from each other), and the NULL character (binary value of zero) which is used internal to the OS kernel to terminate strings. This means that a newline can be included in filenames, which can be used to create havoc to certain automated scripts. :-)

Note that it is possible to make a minimal shell which treats fewer characters as special, but they are so useful that it is worth living with the inconvenience.

And some of the shells make it easier, such as tcsh (my preferred interactive shell) which has filename completion -- you type the beginning of the filename, and then hit a TAB, and it extends the filename out as far as it can (two which are different in only the last characters will let it extend out until the difference is reached, and then wait for you to type a character to un-confuse it. (It will also list the possible complete filenames to help you.) When it encounters a space, tab, or newline in a filename, it will prefix it with a ''. Normally, I use this only once, and rename the file to something more unix-friendly. :-)

And, of course, this is only important if I want to save the file for later re-examination.

So -- now that you now know more than you ever wanted to about unix behavior, I'll go back to reading the other articles. (I'm missing quite a few, because my ISP's news server has had serious problems, which will hopefully be fixed on Monday.)

Enjoy, DoN.

Yep, clearly John Carmack uses Linux because Quake 2 uses this. Very useful. :-)

Tim

-- In the immortal words of Ned Flanders: "No foot longs!" Website @