Yeah. I think that's actually my one, biggest gripe about IPv6, those damn colons. And those damn brackets that were made to mitigate the colons, that just cause more problems:

Just yesterday I tried to use rsync (like I do all the time, in my mind there's no reason to use scp when rsync does everything better), but this time I needed to specify an IPv6 address. On the (admittedly ancient) rsync version that comes with macOS, this doesn't work:

rsync foo 'user@[fe80::4]:/tmp'

Note already, how I had to put the second argument in quotes, because otherwise the shell tries to expand the square brackets as filename expansion.

But even then rsync just complains, because rsync itself separates host from path through colon. I think the only workaround is to do something like `rsync -e 'ssh user@[fe80::4] ...'`... but I just used an updated rsync from homebrew, which is of course the saner method. Still, just another colon/bracket-caused issue.

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ablob an hour ago | parent [-]

Isn't this just an issue with rsync? (or rather your ancient version of it) I think you'd run into the same issues when using an IPv4 address port combination. It was rsync's choice to use colon as an indicator in lieu of IPv6's existence. You'd be complaining all the same for other separator choices if rsync just happened to pick the same one.

Nonetheless I do agree that the choice of colons isn't great due to how it ambiguates their meaning.

	▲	anyfoo an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Absolutely it is. But still, the colons and brackets often make things awkward, leading not only to such compatibility bugs, but to general usability issues. Colons and brackets are just too overloaded within both destination specifiers (e.g. for ports, paths...) and shell syntax, and probably other things, where as the dot '.' rarely is. I'm an avid user of IPv6 by the way, I don't share a lot of the criticism. For me personally it's a net positive. But this is a wart where I wish they went a different direction.