| The renovated Puppy Linux Setup Kit will probably require PHP and PHP-GTK |
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Saturday, November 26th, 2016 05:59:24 GMT |
While trying to figure out the best way to do some new things with my Puppy Linux Setup Kit, I finally found out that various Unix-related systems (including GNU/Linux) are excessively flexible about what characters are allowed in file names.
Here's a detailed essay I found on that topic, from dwheeler.com:
Quite annoyingly, newline characters can be in file names. So, there's no guarantee that each line of output from "find" will contain a complete file path. I also had trouble with trying to make "xargs" deal with paths containing single quotes. And the above essay describes numerous even worse problems.
These problems make me less reluctant to make the Puppy Linux Setup Kit require PHP and PHP-GTK, partly just so I can hopefully avoid a lot of the quirks of Bash programming.
And I still think it was worthwhile to spend a few months struggling with Bash programming, since I learned a lot from that.
But I still have such a tremendously easier time with PHP than Bash scripts that I doubt I'll ever be fully comfortable with the latter, at this rate.
I'll probably still use Bash for simple things, but will probably use PHP for more complicated things.
Control Characters (such as Newline), Leading Dashes, and Other Problems
So, that means using shell commands like "find", "xargs", etc. is much trickier and more inconvenient than I thought.
I still like Bash programming much more than I used to, and I like being able to make some simple GUIs (graphical user interfaces) using only stuff that's already included by default with Puppy Linux, such as GtkDialog, which can be used to make a nice variety of GUI elements.