Re: Escaping special characters for *nix file path

On 29/07/2012, Liam R E Quin <liam@xxxxxx> wrote:
> On Sun, 2012-07-29 at 15:58 +0200, Wolfgang Laun wrote:
>
>> A relatively safe way would be to enclose the path name in apostrophes
>> (') and escape all contained apostrophes and backslashes with a
>> backslash.
>
> It would be if it worked :-)
>
> \ is not special inside '...' in the shell, and neither are ` or $
> (in shell-speak, no interpolation happens and there is no escaping)

Ah, yes, confused... Thanks.

However, ...

>
> This is all about escaping from the shell, though. On Unix (and Linux
> and OS X) a filename can contain any character except NUL (a zero byte)
> or / (because that's the path separator).

...it seemed to me that the OP was worried by the shell's input
interpretation, and so my warning, at least, applies - if not the cure
;-)

>
> If the resulting files are going to be accessed as URIs though, you also
> have to avoid a ton of other characters, and \-escaping doesn't work -
> you have to use uri-escape(), and in that case there's no need to mess
> around with backslashes either.
>
> But all this presupposes particular uses -- presumably XSLT is being
> used to generate a shell script here.

So I thought, too

-W

>
> Liam