Kernel Hacks & Weird Filenames

[Guy Harris]

> For this reason,  I would suggest hacking sh, csh, and ksh to reflect this
> change.

How would you suggest doing this?  Except in I/O redirection, none of the
aforementioned shells have any idea what is or isn't a file name, except for
arguments using wildcards, ~ expansion, etc..  Are you going to forbid
non-printable characters in *all* arguments?  OK, now how do I write an "echo"
command that sends a BEL (^G) character?

Furthermore, what happens if a program goes bonkers and creates a filename
containing such characters?  If the shell won't let you type an "rm" command
with such a filename as argument, how can you get rid of such a file?

More and more UNIX systems running as application machines won't have typical
users running *any* of the above shells; they'll be in some full-screen or
graphical user interface.  In *those* user interfaces, typing ^A in a file-name
field is more likely to send you to the beginning of that field than to insert
a ^A into that field.