Comment by ndsipa_pomu

9 hours ago

You're not wrong, but there's fairly easy ways to deal with filenames containing spaces - usually just enclosing any variable use within double quotes will be sufficient. It's tricker to deal with filenames that contain things such as line breaks as that usually involves using null terminated filenames (null being the only character that is not allowed in filenames). e.g find . -type f -print0

2 comments

ndsipa_pomu

deathanatos 7 hours ago

You're not wrong, but at my place, our main repository does not permit cloning into a directory with spaces in it.

Three factors conspire to make a bug:

  1. Someone decides to use a space
  2. We use Python
  3. macOS

Say you clone into a directory with a space in it. We use Python, so thus our scripts are scripts in the Unix sense. (So, Python here is replacable with any scripting language that uses a shebang, so long as the rest of what comes after holds.) Some of our Python dependencies install executables; those necessarily start with a shebang:

  #!/usr/bin/env python3

Note that space.

Since we use Python virtualenvs,

  #!/home/bob/src/repo/.venv/bin/python3

But … now what if the dir has a space?

  #!/home/bob/src/repo with a space/.venv/bin/python3

Those look like arguments, now, to a shebang. Shebangs have no escaping mechanism.

As I also discovered when I discovered this, the Python tooling checks for this! It will instead emit a polyglot!

  #!/bin/bash

  # <what follows in a bash/python polyglot>
  # the bash will find the right Python interpreter, and then re-exec this
  # script using that interpreter. The Python will skip the bash portion,
  # b/c of cleverness in the polyglot.

Which is really quite clever, IMO. But, … it hits (2.). It execs bash, and worse, it is macOS's bash, and macOS's bash will corrupt^W remove for your safety! certain environment variables from the environment.

Took me forever to figure out what was going on. So yeah … spaces in paths. Can't recommend them. Stuff breaks, and it breaks in weird and hard to debug ways.

joshuaissac 6 hours ago

If all of your scripts run in the same venv (for a given user), can you inject that into the PATH and rely on env just finding the right interpreter?
I suppose it would also need env to be able to handle paths that have spaces in them.