Half of these problems are problems with the shell and have nothing to do with the filesystem. The shell is
really, really, really bad about doing things like expanding spaces in filenames or environment variables into separate arguments. Notice that every example here about how it's "wrong" is a small shell script that has unexpected behaviour. That's mostly because the shell is wrong!
> Oh, and don’t display filenames. Filenames could contain control characters that control the terminal (and X-windows), causing nasty side-effects on display
That's the fault of the terminal, mostly. If it's an otherwise "reasonable" name containing, say, encoded unicode, that's everyone's fault from the filesystem to the terminal to (sometimes) the shell. But the fault is spread out over more than just the fact that the filesystem lets you name files however you like.
But now, Linus' quote there:
> "...filesystem people should aim to make "badly written" code "just work" unless people are really really unlucky. Because like it or not, that’s what 99% of all code is... Crying that it’s an application bug is like crying over the speed of light: you should deal with reality, not what you wish reality was." — Linus Torvalds, on a slightly different topic (but I like the sentiment) (http://lwn.net/Articles/326505/)
speaks to both "sides" here: there are applications in the real world that create filenames with special characters in them. The simplest most obvious of these is the space, but yes, in the real world we have applications that do this. So neither alternate reality ("restrict filesystems' names" or "keep doing what we're doing but have bug-free applications") exists, so which "reality" are you proposing that we deal with here?
> Oh, and don’t display filenames. Filenames could contain control characters that control the terminal (and X-windows), causing nasty side-effects on display
That's the fault of the terminal, mostly. If it's an otherwise "reasonable" name containing, say, encoded unicode, that's everyone's fault from the filesystem to the terminal to (sometimes) the shell. But the fault is spread out over more than just the fact that the filesystem lets you name files however you like.
But now, Linus' quote there:
> "...filesystem people should aim to make "badly written" code "just work" unless people are really really unlucky. Because like it or not, that’s what 99% of all code is... Crying that it’s an application bug is like crying over the speed of light: you should deal with reality, not what you wish reality was." — Linus Torvalds, on a slightly different topic (but I like the sentiment) (http://lwn.net/Articles/326505/)
speaks to both "sides" here: there are applications in the real world that create filenames with special characters in them. The simplest most obvious of these is the space, but yes, in the real world we have applications that do this. So neither alternate reality ("restrict filesystems' names" or "keep doing what we're doing but have bug-free applications") exists, so which "reality" are you proposing that we deal with here?