this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2025
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For interactive use, tab-completion essentially makes this a non-issue, because shells add escaping in the appropriate places.
For scripting, where spaces are harder to deal with, unfortunately there's just not much you can do; your two options are basically to learn all of your particular shell's patterns for dealing with whitespace in filenames, or only write scripts in something other than a POSIX shell.
Scripting isn't the issue, but for tab completion: the boundary is often at a space or parenthesis so that you need to type the backslash + char to continue tabbing to completion
Believe me, whitespace-correct scripting is absolutely an issue.
You're right that it's annoying when filenames diverge right at a character that must be escaped.