Re: sha*sum and filenames with backslashes

[Andreas Schwab]

"Steve Ward" <address@hidden> writes:

> Instead of handling some specific control characters (\n and \r) and the
> backslash, what about using something like the "quoting-style" functionality
> used by 'ls'?  I think it would be a more general solution.

The problem is backward compatibility.  The output must be a proper
extension of the older formats, without changing the format for file
names that were properly handled by previous versions.

> I personally think the "escape" quoting style would best fit what md5sum
> already does, but I guess it really depends on who's going to be reading the
> file names (human, shell, etc.).

That would break backwards compatibility for file names with spaces.

Andreas.

-- 
Andreas Schwab, SuSE Labs, address@hidden
SuSE Linux Products GmbH, Maxfeldstraße 5, 90409 Nürnberg, Germany
PGP key fingerprint = 58CA 54C7 6D53 942B 1756  01D3 44D5 214B 8276 4ED5
"And now for something completely different."