what are some problems you've run into with filenames in the terminal?
so far I have:
- operating on filenames that start with `-` is hard
- spaces in filenames
- accidentally creating files named with special shell characters (~, *, ?)
- maybe non-ASCII / emoji filenames? (would love specific examples)
- (on Mac OS) filenames with uppercase letters can get weird sometimes (would love specific examples!)
what am I missing? (only problems related to filenames please)
my instinct with all of these "weird characters in filenames" problems is to blithely say "use tab completion!" but I feel like that doesn't always work
what are some of examples of cases where tab completion won’t solve a "there's a weird character in a filename" issue? (other than shell scripting!)
@b0rk If there are 2 filenames with a common prefix followed by a character that needs escaped, tab completion won't escape it for you.
I've also had issues with distos installing "bash-completion" by default, which tries to be smart but sometimes gets in the way and removes filenames you want from consideration.
@b0rk I do. It was kinda just the default when I started, and I never really thought about learning alternatives.
@madewokherd yeah that totally makes sense! one of the most interesting things about asking about problems like this has been realizing how many of them are specific to one shell/environment
(like I just learned yesterday that cp -R works totally differently on Mac/Linux)
@madewokherd do you use bash? I think one thing I'm realizing is that bash's tab completion is much less useful than zsh/fish's completion