Escaping spaces broken; mysterious missing directory; data loss

[OJFord]

It seems that spaces cannot be escaped:

$ cd foo\ bar
cd takes 0 or 1 arguments, not 2

This somehow allowed me to create a directory, move something into it, and now not have that directory accessible at all?!

~$ mkdir Documents/foo\ bar
~$ mv thing Documents/foo\ bar
~$ cd ~/Documents/foo\ bar
cd takes 0 or 1 arguments, not 2
~$ cd '~/Documents/foo bar'
cd: no such file or directory: Documents/foo bar
~$ cd ~/Documents/foo
cd: no such file or directory: Documents/foo

The escaping issue is annoying; potentially harmful. But I can't even figure out what mkdir or mv did with the arguments they did receive?

Brought it on myself by using spaces in a way - I was just trying to be consistent with existing directories, but this definitely shouldn't fail as hard as this.

Fortunately my only data loss was a git repo without unpushed changes.

[gforsyth]

Hey @OJFord, thanks for reporting. See #1432 for a long discussion of this issue.
We use quotes to escape things, as \ is the Python line continuation character and Python always wins in xonsh.

As for what happened, you created two directories, one called Documents/foo\ and one called bar. You then moved thing and Documents/foo\ into bar

[OJFord]

From __xonsh_history__ I can see that the \ was escaped itself:

$ __xonsh_history__[idx]
'cd ~/Documents\foo\\ bar'

[OJFord]

Oops, thanks @gforsyth, sorry I missed the duplicate.

As for what happened, you created two directories, one called Documents/foo\ and one called bar. You then moved thing and Documents/foo\ into bar

That's not what happened though - none of those exist anywhere (I've checked find).

[gforsyth]

Not sure, then, since that's the behavior I see:

il@bad_cat ~/tmp 🐚  mkdir Documents
gil@bad_cat ~/tmp 🐚  mkdir Documents/foo\ bar
gil@bad_cat ~/tmp 🐚  touch thing
gil@bad_cat ~/tmp 🐚  mv thing Documents/foo\ bar
gil@bad_cat ~/tmp 🐚  ls
Documents  bar
gil@bad_cat ~/tmp 🐚  ls bar/
'foo\'  thing
gil@bad_cat ~/tmp 🐚  

[OJFord]

Oh, sorry, no I found it.. I overspecified previously.

My actual case was more confusing since I had 5 escape characters; so it did what you described just with more things. Thanks!

I think I know where I come down on "to quote or not to quote" though... I can't imagine ever wanting a literal backslash in this way; quite often if I start typing I'll escape instead of go back to quote - though of course the tab completion helps, just not in the mkdir/mv-to-new case.

Thanks again for such quick help! 😁

[gforsyth]

Happy to help! And agreed, the literal backslash is hardly ever what anyone wants.

[scopatz]

As a quick though, maybe we could have an escape xontrib (as part of bashisms?) that has a precommand hook that let's people use their muscle memory? This would only affect the shalle and not scripts / the language, like other potential bashisms. It might be a good middle ground.