[Ecls-list] Help needed: autoconf with spaces in names

[Matthew Mondor]

On Mon, 04 Oct 2010 01:52:45 +0200
pjb at informatimago.com (Pascal J. Bourguignon) wrote:

> Juan Jose Garcia-Ripoll
> <juanjose.garciaripoll at googlemail.com> writes:
> 
> > It seems that "configure" does not work when one of the directories
> > contains a space in the name. Is this a known limitation?
> 
> Allowing spaces in pathnames would require an effort superior to that of
> the correction of the Y2K bug.  At least, the Y2K bug was limited to the
> handling of dates.  Handling spaces in pathnames would impact absolutely
> ALL the programs and scripts ever written (plus the endoctrinement
> required to prevent further writing of bad scripts, it would probably be
> easier to try to replace all the shells with ones who would avoid the
> problem in the first place, which is almost impossible).

Heh.

But I admit part of this is true, and personally avoid special
characters (as well as space) in file names to avoid the hell of
untagged encodings and character escaping/quoting madness in every
script (or at the CLI, which I use a lot)...

But sorry for replying without suggesting a working solution other than
renaming the "faulty" files.  It is likely that one of the scripts is
missing explicit quotes around the use of a variable, or that it should
use the special option a processing command might support, such as -X
option to grep for piping through xargs, etc.
-- 
Matt