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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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why does noone inprove bash such that you can write a normal foor loop with whitespace in file names? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 6 months ago by barbara@lemmy.ml to c/linux@lemmy.ml

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I know that there are ten different alternatives. Why don't we simply improve the basic stuff?

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[–] taladar@sh.itjust.works 3 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

Every single command, option and argument in the shell is split by spaces, regardless of what it contains. That is clearly the more common case. I am not talking about splitting when the space comes out of a variable but in general, as part of the syntax.

I am well aware of how quoting works to avoid accidental splitting and it is an absolute non-issue in practice once you get used to quoting things, about as annoying as the fact that you have to quote strings in every other programming language, i.e. not at all.

[–] gnuhaut@lemmy.ml 2 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Ah that's your point. Yeah I agree that splitting literal a b c is convenient. It is surprising to many (like here) that this happens after variable substitution, and that's not very convenient since you almost never want that. You could define this to happen the other way around, but then you'd obviously have to invent a new syntax for explicit splitting, which would be its own kind of annoying.

Edit: YSH (oil) does that btw. See here.