Andrew Bernard wrote:
Hi Brandon,
It may be valid, but it is just asking for trouble with many tools and utilities and scripts. Funny, I had to check re UNIX. I have been programming UNIX systems for over thirty years and never even imagined a newline in a filename!
Would the OP say why he needs to use newlines in filenames? Something best avoided. I suppose this is not a Haskell matter, but one does have to ask.
The OP must speak for himself, but as far as I am concerned, no reasonable person uses newlines in filenames, ever. However, the possibility is there, and it may happen that someone unreasonable has created a filename with a newline in it. This may become a security issue if, for example, someone creates a file named "/tmp/foo /etc/passwd bar.log" and a careless system person runs a script as root to remove all files named *.log from /tmp/ and subdirectories. find /tmp -name '*.log' -print | xargs rm is an insanely reckless way to do it, which in this case would cause the removal of the password file. Much better: find /tmp -name '*.log' -type f -print0 | xargs -0 rm or even better: find /tmp -name '*.log' -type f -exec rm {} + In summary, if you have to encode a list of filenames in a byte stream, doing it with zero terminated is the correct way to do it. – Harald