this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2025
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I once accidentally created a file with a newline character in it... it was pretty tricky to fix from command line.
Arrest this person
This is absolutely haram
it was on accident, habibi, I swear 😁. I messed up some cmake code for preprocessing .txt ascii sprites into constants and accidentally created this abomination
I once made a script to delete .o, .lib, and .so files from my huge dev folder to free up space on my home partition.
It did not go as planned.
O no, o no no no
This is why you shouldn't parse
lsoutput btw. UsefindandreadinsteadI actually did this a lot on classic Mac OS. Intentionally.
The reason was that you could put a carriage return as the first character of a file, and it would sort above everything else by name while otherwise being invisible. You just had to copy the carriage return from a text editor and then paste it into the rename field in the Finder.
Since OS X / macOS can still read classic Mac HFS+ volumes, you can indeed still have carriage returns in file names on modern Macs. I don't think you can create them on modern macOS, though. At least not in the Finder or with common Terminal commands.
I created a file with backspace in name, it was hard to understand why filename doesn't match
I don't conduct interviews very often, but when I do, one of my questions is always about interacting with files that have special characters in the filename.
Did you not just use tab? That's the usual method of dealing with weird characters in filenames that I've found
This was quite a while ago now, but I don't think my shell escaped the tab complete properly, I remember it just printing a literal newline and evaluating it as a second command. I think there was other unicode in there too, otherwise I would have just typed it out. I had to do something with null terminated output and piping it in to
mv, but I can't remember what exactly.Too bad when there's multiple files starting with and consisting mostly of e.g. kanji (when on a Latin keyboard).
With the right shell, you can just press tab multiple times to cycle through the possible completions.