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Date: Tue, 27 Feb 2007 14:58:06 -0500 (EST)
From: Igor Peshansky <pechtcha AT cs DOT nyu DOT edu>
Reply-To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
To: Phil Edwards <phil DOT m DOT edwards AT gmail DOT com>
cc: Furash Gary <furashg AT mcao DOT maricopa DOT gov>, cygwin AT cygwin DOT com, ebb9 AT byu DOT net
Subject: Re: Strange message from updatedb
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On Tue, 27 Feb 2007, Phil Edwards wrote:

> On 2/27/07, Furash Gary <furashg AT XXXX DOT XXXXXXXX DOT XXX> wrote:

<http://cygwin.com/acronyms/#PCYMTNQREAIYR>.  Thanks.

> > /cygdrive/c/System\ Volume\ Information
>
> Quotes and backslashes aren't going to solve the problem, I think.  I
> looked at updatedb (it's a shell script), and the --prunepaths
> argument is passed through a sed script which replaces spaces in order
> to turn it all into a regexp.  There's no way of telling sed to avoid
> some spaces and translate others.

That's not quite true.  Quoted arguments will be harder, but for
backslash-escaped spaces it's reasonably easy.  Something like

sed -e 's,\\\\,\e,g' -e 's,\([^\\]\) ,\1#,g' -e 's,\e,\\\\,g'

replaces all unescaped spaces with '#'s, while preserving escaped spaces
and backslashes.  The idea for quotes would be similar, except you first
have to replace all spaces within matching quotes by some character
unlikely to occur in the string (the above assumes that ESC will not be in
the string).  The sed info page provides an example of a similar approach.

> You used to be able to set the internal PRUNEREGEX variable directly,
> in a .conf file, but apparently that file is only used under Linux
> versions of updatedb, or something.

The Cygwin version of updatedb comes from GNU findutils, as do the Linux
versions, IIRC.  So the behavior should be the same, unless the configure
options differed when the packages were built.  This is something best
answered by the findutils maintainer...

> Most lists of dirs are passed around with colon (or some such)
> separators to avoid just such problems with paths containing
> whitespace.  updatedb is still living in the 80's.

Well, it's a matter of convention.  Colons are legal in filenames on Unix,
as is pretty much any character except for NUL.  However, many tools treat
colons specially, so it's conventionally used as a separator.  If you have
to pick a character to use as a path separator, a space is as good as any.
You'd still need quoting or escape characters to represent the separator.
	Igor
-- 
				http://cs.nyu.edu/~pechtcha/
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ZZZzz /,`.-'`'    -.  ;-;;,_		Igor Peshansky, Ph.D. (name changed!)
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