Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Re: {arch} directory

[Tom Lord]

    > From: MJ Ray <address@hidden>

    > So that's for bash.  tcsh treats {arch} as if it said arch, AFAICT.  
    > rc uses braces to group commands.

In general: fight back against shells screwing up the namespace of
files by "taking over" various characters.

Baroque shell mechanisms can sometimes do a good job of making the
special interpretation of characters very context specific.  That's
fine.

But there's lots of reasons to want to have all kinds of "funky file
names" -- the file system is, after all, a form of database.   File
names are a primary key for that database.   Limiting the space of
reasonably usable keys is lame.

Personally, I interact with shells mostly in emacs buffers.  I happen
to mostly use bash and ash.   I really don't know why it works out --
but it does -- that I generally don't have problems with strange
characters.   Probably a large part of it (wrt bash) is that I rely on
Emacs', not bash's completion mechanisms.   At least that's an
existence proof that shell interaction, with completion, doesn't have
to preclude lots of file names.

Shells can have $.  We'll give them that :-)

-t