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▲ deathanatos 3 hours ago

You're not wrong, but at my place, our main repository does not permit cloning into a directory with spaces in it.

Three factors conspire to make a bug:

  1. Someone decides to use a space
  2. We use Python
  3. macOS
Say you clone into a directory with a space in it. We use Python, so thus our scripts are scripts in the Unix sense. (So, Python here is replacable with any scripting language that uses a shebang, so long as the rest of what comes after holds.) Some of our Python dependencies install executables; those necessarily start with a shebang:

  #!/usr/bin/env python3
Note that space.

Since we use Python virtualenvs,

  #!/home/bob/src/repo/.venv/bin/python3
But … now what if the dir has a space?

  #!/home/bob/src/repo with a space/.venv/bin/python3
Those look like arguments, now, to a shebang. Shebangs have no escaping mechanism.

As I also discovered when I discovered this, the Python tooling checks for this! It will instead emit a polyglot!

  #!/bin/bash

  # <what follows in a bash/python polyglot>
  # the bash will find the right Python interpreter, and then re-exec this
  # script using that interpreter. The Python will skip the bash portion,
  # b/c of cleverness in the polyglot.
Which is really quite clever, IMO. But, … it hits (2.). It execs bash, and worse, it is macOS's bash, and macOS's bash will corrupt^W remove for your safety! certain environment variables from the environment.

Took me forever to figure out what was going on. So yeah … spaces in paths. Can't recommend them. Stuff breaks, and it breaks in weird and hard to debug ways.

▲joshuaissac 2 hours ago | parent [-]

If all of your scripts run in the same venv (for a given user), can you inject that into the PATH and rely on env just finding the right interpreter?

I suppose it would also need env to be able to handle paths that have spaces in them.