I’ve always liked underscores better because it differentiates from the file extension. It just makes sense. Except it is a wider character, so it’d be longer.
In this day and age where most of not all modern media library management software can decipher almost anything without any problem, is that really an issue?
“\ “ and [tab] and * are your friends. I’ve been using spaces in Unix filesystems since the early 90s with no issues. Also, using terminal fonts that•put•a•faint•dot•in•each•space•character helps.
This is fine for the most basic of use cases but once you start looping through file names or what have you, you have to start writing robust correct bash and nobody does that
Yeah but at least with periods in the title tab complete will just complete the file name all the way while with a filename with spaces I have to escape the damn space with “\ ” like you said. Why do more work when I don’t have to?
I work on a Web app and we recently decided that we’re just not gonna support double quotes in free text fields because oh holy balls what a thing it is to try to deal with those in a way that doesn’t open you up to multiple encoding vulnerabilities.
The issue is the filter that we’re using to avoid multiple encoding attacks de-escapes everything via multiple rounds, then tries to pass it to the next layer of filtering with the de-escaped request body as a json string. Your absolutely right that this is a silly way of doing it, but sometimes we have to live with decisions that were made before we were onboarded to a project. In this particular case, I pushed to improve the filters but all our PO heard was “spend development time weakening security” and at the end of the day they decide what to do and we do it.
This method is a band-aid patch when your downstream code is all messed up and you can’t fix it. Instead of treating the input string correctly, it just removes anything that might possibly trigger some vulnerability in wrong code.
It’s a way bigger pain in the ass than people think it is. I remember having to parse output from a tool for work that had tons of output in tabular format, mixed with normal sentence like strings. JSON, YAML, or XML outputs weren’t available so I had to do a nasty mess of grep, awk, cut, and head/tail, to get what I wanted. My first attempt was literally counting the characters so I could cut out exactly what I needed, but as we all know, hardcoding values is a recipe for headaches later on.
Here’s a horror story from literally yesterday. We have been fighting a system for a client for weeks and it has been a nightmare. Our clients just told us that they outsourced some of their work to an Indian outfit but that outfit is unfamiliar with Linux and doesn’t know how to edit text files so they have been downloading the files to their Windows machines, editing them in Windows, then uploading the contaminated text files back into Linux. None of them, not our client nor the outfit they hired, understood why this was a problem. We have no idea what files are affected and we won’t know until they fail because they obviously did not keep track of what they touched.
I will never forgive excel for automatically converting all of my dates to some weird ass format, or stripping single quotes randomly, or something other BS that they do for no reason
My absolute favourite is stripping leading zeroes from any text that looks like a number, then displaying it in scientific notation. But we get Copilot, so it balances out, right?
Does windows add an extra character at the end that gets converted to new line on linux? Because the other day I were copying a script and after pasting it an extra line was added after every single line, even the empty lines.
In my experience, files are named pretty well these days to include resolution, source, the actual title and release year, video format, audio format, language, and release group.
Try looking at the way music files are named and you’ll see how awful naming conventions can get.
I think your workflow is not optimal. Are you using software like Radarr and Sonarr? They do the renaming for you and come with Kodi integration. Or is this not feasible?
I think OP means ROM files for video games systems. Kodi has a RetroArch plugin. As I’m sure you’re aware, Sonarr and Radarr only do TV shows and movies, respectively. Managing ROM packs is a pain in the ass because there are usually thousands of files in a pack (I think there’s something stupid like 9,000 ROMs for NES or SNES).
There is a database that I found called Smoke Monster’s Database, it’s actually a bunch of “databases” (files, not actually databases) that you load into a program and point it at a directory and it categorizes, organizes, and renamed everything for you.
A lot of ROM packs that are out there are pretty old considering the systems that they’re for are decades old and have been passed around and added to for years. The packs are usually in a flat file structure and there are usually multiple files for the same game (version updates from the manufacturer) so it gets annoying pretty quickly. Do you want to have to scroll through 9000 NES games just to get to the Zelda: A Link to the Past?
Look up SMDB (smoke monster’s database). You can download a tool (I forget what it’s actually called, I think one is called ROM manager) which reads the SMDB files and compares the hashes to your ROMs and will categorize and rename them for you. It looks for duplicates, unofficial releases/hacks/patches, categorizes them by country (US, EU and Japan largely), and more. It’s a pretty nifty tool.
I spent like two hours going through PS1 ROMs and was like “there’s got to be a better way!” (insert cheesy black and white infomerical cutaway), started looking up stuff and there it was. Not all game systems are supported (mostly NES, SNES, Genesis/MegaDrive, and a few others) but you can build SMDB “packs” yourself.
I forget if it works on Windows, but I know it works on Linux and it’s either a script or a compiled binary, I forget which, but you can definitely script it, I’ve done so myself since the command string tends to be a bit long.
It’s legacy, white spaces weren’t allowed as characters on most FTP software, which is how the warez scene shares it’s releases. It used to be underscores, but dots are closer to a white space regarding separation (space wise), so most release groups use dots nowadays.
Generally, a white space as a character in filenames and directories is “frowned upon” in many operating systems, Windows included (somewhat). It makes writing scripts and software more comlicated because it’s used as as a separator for giving command line/terminal options to commands and binaries (programs).
it goes way back before ftp.. i believe its because the original operating systems filesystems/namespacing could not handle the space character at all. so all files lacked spaces in their names. but only for like the first 30 years
Yes, you’re correct, it goes much further back than FTP, all the way down to UNIX I believe. The problem was commands and parameters (options) which use a white space to seperate between them. So, filenames and directories were’t allowed to have white spaces in them.
There was at one time a group pushing to make a more active up to date. User friendly plan 9. Distro if I remember correctly called Harvey OS. They may still be at it. But such a small group means that it’s going to take a long time combined with a lot of effort. And at this point so many things have moved on and become rather linux specific even. That the task only keeps getting more and more difficult.
Honestly, in the interim, many of plan 9’s better features were adopted in some small part or completely by other operating systems. Definitely not quite as elegantly.
What I really want to know is why is nobody here talking about inferno. It’s what came after plan 9.
Sounds like my experience with QNX 6. It was fun for a while, especially with the microkernel novelty. I could kill the mouse driver and bring it back to life. It was interesting to have that on a 486 with memory corruption issues.
files.catbox.moe
Hot