Re: Case Insensitive File Systems -- Torvalds Hates Them

Richard Kettlewell <invalid@invalid.invalid> wrote:

 
Second, the issue in shell is is that newlines (or spaces) interact
badly with its approach to string handling: a filename can cause a
script to unexpectedly fail. For all that C has truly awful string
handling, it doesn't go awry just because there's a space or newline in
a string that it's working with.

When dealing with programs like find, sort, uniq etc. it's more of
a data format issue than a shell issue. As in the link from the GNU
find documentation which I supplied before where "find" apparantly
runs "sort" itself and needs that to support null-terminated line
delimiters to handle newlines in filenames, rather than the default
newline-terminated format:
http://www.gnu.org/software/findutils/manual/html_node/find_html/Newline-Handling.html

Of course a C program can use any character to separate strings,
but newlines are most common in existing UNIX tools for text string
processing, and most easily human-readable, so it's convenient to
use that data format. But it means assuming that newlines in
filenames won't actually appear.

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