Kernel Hacks & Weird Filenames

[Chris Torek]

>In article <11204 at mimsy.UUCP> I wrote:
>>(`ls' prints `?' for control characters; `ls|cat -v'
>>expands them; other programs have other means of displaying them.)

In article <4965 at chinet.UUCP> les at chinet.UUCP (Leslie Mikesell) writes:
>What? How can ls|cat -v display control characters if ls changes them?
>Perhaps someone has fixed your utilities and that is the reason this
>problem doesn't bother you.  On out-of-the-box SysVr3 ....

Well, there is the problem!  You are using the Other Leading Brand! :-)
4BSD ls, whatever its faults, does this magic translation, but only
if isatty(1), which is sometimes bizarre, and is why ls|... works.

>>There is *always* a user agent (often more than one) between the
>>user and the system.  I do not know what you mean here.

>I mean the sort of thing where the user agent "knows" when you are
>typing a filename, generally by associating the file with the application
>that uses it.  And I call it silly because it precludes the concept of
>software tools.

That sounds like what is usually called a `naive user interface'.
If you have naive users, you give them one of these interfaces, and
they happily sit inside their naive little sub-world doing restricted
operations.  As the user wants to do more, you open the interface
wider and let them see all the horrors :-) of the real implementation
---in this case, including unusual characters in file names.

As a general rule, the closer you get to the real implementation,
the more you should be able to do.  I think that includes funny
characters in file names.
-- 
In-Real-Life: Chris Torek, Univ of MD Comp Sci Dept (+1 301 454 7163)
Domain:	chris at mimsy.umd.edu	Path:	uunet!mimsy!chris