Re: [PATCH] Try URI quoting for embedded TAB and LF in pathnames

Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net> writes:

Yes, that's right.

The convention I had been thinking of adding is to have GNU diff use shell-quoting style, e.g.,

'three o'\''clock'

to represent a file name with a newline and an apostrophe in it. This sort of file name can be cut and pasted into the shell. The quoting could be used with any file name containing a troublesome character.

Perhaps another quoting style would be better.

An issue I hadn't really had time to think about is the character encoding of file names. E.g., suppose one file system uses UTF-8 encoding for Japanese file names, and another file system uses EUC-JP. I suppose it would be nice to handle this problem too. Perhaps GNU 'diff' could standardize on using UTF-8 in its file names, regardless of what the underlying file system uses. Another option is to pass the bytes of the file name through, no matter what. This might require a runtime flag to diff, or to patch, or both.