On Thu, Jan 7, 2021 at 12:04 PM D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
| From: Dhaval Giani via talk <talk@gtalug.org>
| On Thu, Jan 7, 2021 at 11:32 AM D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
| > Also: | > evince 'RE\: something.pdf' | > fails because evince tries to open a file with \ in its name. | | That is because within the single quotes, it will not use the \ as an | escape character. I'm unsure of the behaviour within double quotes.
OK, my model is that there are two entities that are doing quoting/globbing/etc.
1. the shell
2. the application program (evince) itself.
This second is un-UNIX-like behaviour. But common in other operating systems.
The single quotes are not seen by 2. They are interpreted by 1.
But I established that the RE: was being handled (mishandled) by 2.
So I wanted a "quote" function for 2. I tried \ but 2 did not treat it as a metacharacter.
There might be a quote function for 2 but I don't know it.
There are applications that make interpretations of filenames but this often creates problems.
OK, good point. Can you run a strace on evince and see how it is calling open on that file?
- if a filename looks like a flag argument, applications will try to handle it as a flag argument. Many applications provide a workaround this with a - flag argument which means "treat the rest of the arguments as filenames, even if they start with -"
- scp interprets hostname:filename as just that. This means that 'RE: something.pdf" will be a problem for scp. Solution: prepend with ./
I don't know what evince is trying to do.
Just out of curiosity. When you try to use shell autocomplete using the tab key, what does it autocomplete to? Dhaval