this post was submitted on 12 Dec 2023
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If the
date
command returns an RFC-3339-formatted string, the filename will contain a space. If, for example, you want to iterate over the files usingfor d in $(find...)
and forget to set$IFS
properly, it can cause issues.But
$(date)
does return a string with spaces, at least on every system I've ever used. And what's so bad about the possibility of spaces in filenames? They're slightly inconvenient in a command line, but I haven't used a commuter this century that didn't support spaces in filenames.Bro, literally re-read the comment you replied to. It has an example of what might happen.
Ok, I just reread it. I don't see what you think I'm missing. You mean an improperly written find command misbehaving? The fact that a different date format could prevent a bug from manifesting doesn't seem like much of an argument.
Spaces can exist in filenames. The only problem is that they have to be escaped. As the comment that you reread explained,
cat hello world.txt
would print the fileshello
andworld.txt
. If you wanted to print the file"hello world.txt"
you'd either need to quote it (cat "hello world.txt"
) or escape the space (cat hello\ world.txt
)Oh, the horror!