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