‘Well it’s only passing mv a list of–’ yeah yeah yeah, I know, and that’s why I’m calling bullshit. It should be massively harder to execute filenames. Even if 1970s decisions make that the eternal hideous default: the lack of any idiot-proof standard workaround is incomprehensible.

StackOverflow’s full of competing one-liners and people pointing out how each one is considered harmful. The least-skeezy options use exec. That sentence should make anyone recoil in horror.

This is not a filename problem. This is a tool problem. If a single printable character is going to silently expand into a list of names, then for god’s sake, having it put each name in quotes should be fucking trivial.

  • NeatNit
    3·
    10 months ago

    I’m also a bit lost. From the final sentence “having it put each name in quotes should be fucking trivial.” OP seems to complain that filenames with spaces expand into multiple arguments. I can’t recreate this with this command in bash:

    $ printf %s\\n *.jpg

    This command prints each argument in its own line. Replace *.jpg with whatever to prove it to yourself. Filenames with spaces show in full in a single line for me.