I think anyone starting a filename with whitespace deserves to suffer.
It's not a matter of suffering or not. It's a matter of being able to bypass
security.
Suppose a setuid script will only write to a file I own, and I want to attack "fred".
I create "(space)fred", it checks with "-O" and notes that I own it, and then proceeds
to strip the whitespace on the open. And boom, I've written into a file I don't
own.
Do not simply "ignore" special characters, saying "the user will have to suffer". As a bad guy, I could exploit your ignorance (heh), and get in. Bad design,
worse results.
-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker