On the command line, space is what separates each argument. If a path contains a space, you either have to quote the entire path, or use an escape character (e.g. the \ character in most shells, the backtick in Powershell because Microsoft is weird, or the character’s hexadecimal value), otherwise the path will be passed to the command as separate arguments. For example, cat hello world.txt would try to print the files hello and world.txt.
It is a good practice to minimize the character set used by filenames, and best to only use English alphanumeric characters and certain symbols like -, _, and .. Non-printable characters (like the lower half of ASCII), weird diacritics (like ő or ű), ligatures, or any characters that could be misinterpreted by a program should be avoided.
This is why byte-safe encodings, like base64 or percent-encoding, are important. Transmitting data directly as text runs the risk of mangling the characters because some program misinterpreted them.
but what does the command line matter for dates? sure every once in a while you’ll have to pass a date as an argument on the command line but I think usually that kind of data is handled by APIs without human intervention, so once these are set up properly, I don’t see the problem
On the command line, space is what separates each argument. If a path contains a space, you either have to quote the entire path, or use an escape character (e.g. the
\character in most shells, the backtick in Powershell because Microsoft is weird, or the character’s hexadecimal value), otherwise the path will be passed to the command as separate arguments. For example,cat hello world.txtwould try to print the fileshelloandworld.txt.It is a good practice to minimize the character set used by filenames, and best to only use English alphanumeric characters and certain symbols like
-,_, and.. Non-printable characters (like the lower half of ASCII), weird diacritics (like ő or ű), ligatures, or any characters that could be misinterpreted by a program should be avoided.This is why byte-safe encodings, like base64 or percent-encoding, are important. Transmitting data directly as text runs the risk of mangling the characters because some program misinterpreted them.
but what does the command line matter for dates? sure every once in a while you’ll have to pass a date as an argument on the command line but I think usually that kind of data is handled by APIs without human intervention, so once these are set up properly, I don’t see the problem