Many of the "tried and tested" tools of Perl have problems with spaces in directory names, most notably CPAN.pm, and Inline::C (not in the category "tried and tested"). I find this is especialy weird, because under Unix file names with whitespace are much longer allowed than in the Win32 world, and given the Unix-centricity of the developers, this should have been an issue a long time ago. It seems that nobody ever went and fixed the issues. I did once try to hunt down all the cases where CPAN.pm fails to do the Right Thing when (not) quoting filenames, but gave up.
So the moral of this is - don't install Perl below a directory with spaces in its name.
| [reply] |
Unix has allowed its users to make up filenames of all kinds of funny characters for ages, including the newline, tab and space.
It seems, weird characters in filenames have been a no no for unix users - so developers didn't care much about it, why shouldn't we grant everybody the right to mess up if they wanted to? - until windows recently startet "abusing" white spaces in filenames.
From the new perspective of giving the user a safe environment, there seem to be all kinds of issues to fix. Spaces seem lame compared to newline, semicolon and some other things.
Cheers, Sören
| [reply] |