Axel 🚴😷🐧🐪⌨ | #WeAreNatenom1d ago

#TIL: You can't save a spreadsheet in the "Save as" dialog in #LibreOffice whose file name contains an asterisk ("*"). You don't get any error message nor an greyed out "Save" button. It just does nothing, even though the originally opened file has that asterisk in the name. Escaping via backslash also doesn't work. 🤬 🤌

.oO( What happens when seasoned Unix #CLI users with strong experience in quoting and escaping try out a #GUI program… )

Show threadOrion Ussner kidder1d ago
@xtaran This is fascinating. It would never occur to me put an * in a file name because those are wildcards.
Show threadAxel 🚴😷🐧🐪⌨ | #WeAreNatenom1d ago
@OrionKidder: In Unix any character except slash and a nullbyte are valid for file names. 😇 Depending on your application (or shell) you might need some quoting or escaping. 😁 Applications which don't support that (or escaping or quoting) are buggy.
Show threadOrion Ussner kidder
@xtaran Interesting! The last time I had *any* command-line skills was the 90s in DOS, so I'm way behind.
Apr 15 at 4:15pmWeb
Show threadAxel 🚴😷🐧🐪⌨ | #WeAreNatenom23h ago

@OrionKidder: And I gave talks about Unix shell quoting and escaping (and the three levels of quoting) last—oh, no, that's wrong—penultimate decade: https://noone.org/talks/quoting/

My talks and slides were in German, though, and are based on https://people.mpi-inf.mpg.de/~uwe/lehre/unixffb/quoting-guide.html (this time English) whose origins are even older as I learned of it in a seminar during studies (late 90s) quoting that guide. 🧔‍♂️🤓 👴

Shell-Quoting verstehen