rpmbuild and whitespace in path names

[Cameron Simpson]

On 18Dec2006 08:54, Mikkel L. Ellertson <mikkel at infinity-ltd.com> wrote:
| You will find that a lot of commands will not handle spaces in a
| directory/file name well. A big part of that is that when a lot of
| the CLI programs were written, spaces were not allowed in names.

What makes you believe this last sentence? I've been able to put spaces
in filenames in UNIX for more than 20 years, and I know the APIs and
filesystems have allowed it longer than that.

It is true that a lot of badly authored shell scripts don't cope with
space in names and that, as you've said, because spaces separate words
in the shell that working with names with spaces is slightly fiddly.

But they've been _allowed_ for decades; the only character you can't put
in a UNIX filename is a NUL ('\0') because the API uses C strings, which
are NUL terminated.
-- 
Cameron Simpson <cs at zip.com.au> DoD#743
http://www.cskk.ezoshosting.com/cs/