[GTALUG] odd evince command behaviour

[Dhaval Giani]

On Thu, Jan 7, 2021 at 12:04 PM D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk
<talk at gtalug.org> wrote:
>
> | From: Dhaval Giani via talk <talk at gtalug.org>
>
> | On Thu, Jan 7, 2021 at 11:32 AM D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk <talk at gtalug.org> wrote:
>
> | > Also:
> | >         evince 'RE\: something.pdf'
> | > fails because evince tries to open a file with \ in its name.
> |
> | That is because within the single quotes, it will not use the \ as an
> | escape character. I'm unsure of the behaviour within double quotes.
>
> OK, my model is that there are two entities that are doing
> quoting/globbing/etc.
>
> 1. the shell
>
> 2. the application program (evince) itself.
>
> This second is un-UNIX-like behaviour.  But common in other operating
> systems.
>
> The single quotes are not seen by 2.  They are interpreted by 1.
>
> But I established that the RE: was being handled (mishandled) by 2.
>
> So I wanted a "quote" function for 2.  I tried \ but 2 did not treat
> it as a metacharacter.
>
> There might be a quote function for 2 but I don't know it.
>
> There are applications that make interpretations of filenames but this
> often creates problems.
>

OK, good point. Can you run a strace on evince and see how it is
calling open on that file?

> - if a filename looks like a flag argument, applications will try to
>   handle it as a flag argument.  Many applications provide a workaround
>   this with a - flag argument which means "treat the rest of the arguments
>   as filenames, even if they start with -"
>
> - scp interprets hostname:filename as just that.  This means that 'RE:
>   something.pdf" will be a problem for scp.  Solution: prepend with ./
>
> I don't know what evince is trying to do.

Just out of curiosity. When you try to use shell autocomplete using
the tab key, what does it autocomplete to?

Dhaval