On Thu, Jan 7, 2021 at 12:04 PM D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk <[email protected]> wrote: > > | From: Dhaval Giani via talk <[email protected]> > > | On Thu, Jan 7, 2021 at 11:32 AM D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk > <[email protected]> wrote: > > | > Also: > | > evince 'RE\: something.pdf' > | > fails because evince tries to open a file with \ in its name. > | > | That is because within the single quotes, it will not use the \ as an > | escape character. I'm unsure of the behaviour within double quotes. > > OK, my model is that there are two entities that are doing > quoting/globbing/etc. > > 1. the shell > > 2. the application program (evince) itself. > > This second is un-UNIX-like behaviour. But common in other operating > systems. > > The single quotes are not seen by 2. They are interpreted by 1. > > But I established that the RE: was being handled (mishandled) by 2. > > So I wanted a "quote" function for 2. I tried \ but 2 did not treat > it as a metacharacter. > > There might be a quote function for 2 but I don't know it. > > There are applications that make interpretations of filenames but this > often creates problems. >
OK, good point. Can you run a strace on evince and see how it is calling open on that file? > - if a filename looks like a flag argument, applications will try to > handle it as a flag argument. Many applications provide a workaround > this with a - flag argument which means "treat the rest of the arguments > as filenames, even if they start with -" > > - scp interprets hostname:filename as just that. This means that 'RE: > something.pdf" will be a problem for scp. Solution: prepend with ./ > > I don't know what evince is trying to do. Just out of curiosity. When you try to use shell autocomplete using the tab key, what does it autocomplete to? Dhaval --- Post to this mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe from this mailing list https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
