To be fair, I didn’t really focus on the biggest annoyance I’ve had with spaces in the file name: going between terminals and the GUI, most filenames you can copy and paste with wild abandon, but filenames with spaces always require special care, sometimes stripping the auto completed escaped space from file names from the terminal, or quoting or escaping the space when taking one from the GUI.
You are correct, that is how I worked around the issue and why I mentioned that work around in my original post
for f in *.txt; do cat $f; done
Will error for example. It works fine for filenames without space, but if the filename has space in it, it will be interpreted wrong. But if your testing batch doesn’t have spaces in the filename, you won’t see the issue until it’s used on a file that does. Note ‘cat’ is a placeholder, any function/script that can be used on a file here will have the same issue.
Something similar to that caught me last week while I was unzipping multiple mods in bulk for a game.
The problem is really that space is an argument separator, so to safely handle filenames with spaces you need to handle them special, either by escaping them, quoting the entire thing. This means that the filename with spaces can’t be just copy pasted wherever you want, you have handle them special. It adds complications that are resolved by just using a separator that isnt used for other things, like underscore, or dash. Dot I also don’t like as much as it’s used as a separator for extensions, but that’s a far easier problem to handle by just ignoring all but the last dot, leaving only one really bad edge case (a file that does not have an extension, that uses dot separator in its filename having the filesystem imply a wrong extension.
What changed? I thought that is still what they did.