Is it safe to start using spaces in file/folder names yet?

[Eric]

Because I can't bring myself to do it, everything still gets an underscore or a dot.

 

[Cmaier]

I have been doing it for many years. No problems.

 

[Eric]

I have been doing it for many years. No problems.

HTML gave me %20 shock.

 

[Cmaier]

HTML gave me %20 shock.

Any UNIX-style OS should handle it fine, though if you are using the terminal you need to know when to use escape characters or tick marks. But everything in the Mac gui has been able to cope with it without problem for as long as I’ve used mac.

I don’t know about Windows, though - when I hand files to my colleagues they seem to come back with underscores or whatnot, because I think they have problems on that side of the fence.

 

[mr_roboto]

Any UNIX-style OS should handle it fine, though if you are using the terminal you need to know when to use escape characters or tick marks. But everything in the Mac gui has been able to cope with it without problem for as long as I’ve used mac.

Full support for spaces in filenames goes back to day 1 of the Mac, long before MacOS X transformed the Mac into a UNIX platform.

Legacy Macintosh System compatibility issues did add some oddities to MacOS X filenames, relative to other UNIX operating systems. The biggest is that Apple's Macintosh filesystem designs preserved case, but are case-insensitive, whereas UNIX systems are traditionally case preserving and case sensitive. In out-of-the-box Mac OS X installations, you can't create FILE.TXT and file.txt in the same directory, because those are the same filename.

Another one is that colons required special handling because they're what classic MacOS uses as a path separator, not the UNIX forward slash. Try creating a file with a colon in its name in Terminal and then looking at it in Finder...

 

[diamond.g]

Any UNIX-style OS should handle it fine, though if you are using the terminal you need to know when to use escape characters or tick marks. But everything in the Mac gui has been able to cope with it without problem for as long as I’ve used mac.

I don’t know about Windows, though - when I hand files to my colleagues they seem to come back with underscores or whatnot, because I think they have problems on that side of the fence.

NTFS doesn't care. I am pretty sure FAT32/exFAT has issues with it though.

 

[Hrafn]

Any UNIX-style OS should handle it fine, though if you are using the terminal you need to know when to use escape characters or tick marks. But everything in the Mac gui has been able to cope with it without problem for as long as I’ve used mac.

I don’t know about Windows, though - when I hand files to my colleagues they seem to come back with underscores or whatnot, because I think they have problems on that side of the fence.

Windows still can’t handle it well.

 

[Eric]

Windows still can’t handle it well.

Which is where all of my previous coding experience comes from but I haven't had to do it in years. I've never really done it on a Mac but old habits die hard so I continue to add underscores for spaces.

 

[Nycturne]

Any UNIX-style OS should handle it fine, though if you are using the terminal you need to know when to use escape characters or tick marks. But everything in the Mac gui has been able to cope with it without problem for as long as I’ve used mac.

Yeah, there's definitely some tools that called out to CLI processes back in the day that sometimes did it in ways that would fall apart when there were spaces in the path. It's been quite a while since I've run into those. I think it was in the 10.4 days last time I actively hit it.

 

[Yoused]

It seems odd that bash would have trouble with spaces in file names. When you enter

~> command filename -options​

the "-options" part always is marked with the hyphen, so the command can consume the filename up to the hyphen (or delimiter, such as comma).

Another one is that colons required special handling because they're what classic MacOS uses as a path separator

My cousin decided my Time Capsule image directory needed descriptive names (which pissed me off because that put all the pictures out of order, unlike "IM2051.jpg" etc) and somehow he managed to get a colon embedded into one of the file names. So, that file is toast now – I cannot open it, move it, rename it or delete it because the colon bungles everything up.

 

[Cmaier]

It seems odd that bash would have trouble with spaces in file names. When you enter

~> command filename -options​

the "-options" part always is marked with the hyphen, so the command can consume the filename up to the hyphen (or delimiter, such as comma).

The arguments are split on whitespace and are accessible as environment variables from each command-line app. The shell has no way of knowing if “command word word -options” is intended to be two arguments followed by an option, or even that there is anything special about options (because command-line apps are free to define their own syntax).