On Fri, Jan 08, 2021 at 11:55:38AM -0500, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote: > | From: Lennart Sorensen via talk <[email protected]> > > | : is special in filenames if it is before the first directory separator > | for many programs > > That's not UNIX, that's MS-DOS.
I said for many programs, not for unix in general. > In UNIX, special interpretation is done by the shell. > > | since it might be host:filepath > > The ssh family of commands introduced this, and for that it is > documented in those commands. > > | evince for example allows ftp://host/file so it clearly cares about : > | in the filename before any slash. > > Now that I look, it is partially documented in evince(1). > > It says that the operand is a filename. But in the description of a > filename, it includes a remote filename. It doesn't say what that is, > except to give an FTP example "ftp://adobe.com/sample.pdf";. Well it's man page is about typical for a gnu project. Almost useless. :) Unfortunately it doesn't have an info document and the online docs are not much better. > I infer: it can be a filename or a URL. It is assumed to be a URL if > it starts with letters and then a colon. If something happens to be a > filename that matches that pattern, tough luck. Yeah that seems to be the state of it. No fall back to plain filename if it fails to be a known http or ftp protocol. Maybe they figure that since you can't use : in a filename on windows, no one would do it anywhere. > Since, in practice, URLs seem to always contain "/", and filenames do > not, that would be a better way to distinguish them. somewhere/myfile.txt sure looks like it has a / in it. > | That's why using ./ in front works. Otherwise you have to escape the : > | with a \ or perhaps even two of them depending who strips it. > > No, \ does not work for that purpose (my experiments are in this > thread). Maybe \\ so the shell can steal one and evince get the other? Hmm, nope tried and doesn't work. ./ on the other hand does seem to work. -- Len Sorensen --- Post to this mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe from this mailing list https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
