Re: whitespace in filenames

[Stephan Beal]

On Wed, Sep 24, 2008 at 10:37 PM, Louis-David Mitterrand > OK, this
makes sense now. Is the culprit 'shell' or 'patsubst' or both?

It's mostly the shell. When you pass a command to a shell, it strips
any quotes around strings, giving the program an unquoted/unescaped
copy of that string. If that program then tries to pass on the string,
the quotes are gone and can't always be reconstructed. When you start
passing strings around, the quotes are liked to get hosed somewhere,
and it's not always possible to know exactly how many escapes you need
between yourself and your goal. Spaces in a filesystem, as a rule, are
problematic on Unix (not fatal, but problematic).

-- 
----- stephan beal
http://wanderinghorse.net/home/stephan/