[MPlayer-dev-eng] Re: [RFC][PATCH] New option -identify

[D Richard Felker III]

On Mon, Oct 21, 2002 at 10:12:58AM +0200, Eric Lammerts wrote:
> 
> On Sun, 20 Oct 2002, Tobias Diedrich wrote:
> > Do we have a shell-escape function ?
> > Would be nice to add quotes around the name ("name") and escape shell
> > meta characters (`\!$"), but I think this could be done in a wrapper
> > script too.
> 
> Shell escapes are inconvenient when you want to parse the output with
> something else (e.g., perl or a C program).

They're even inconvenient in a shell script! It's much nicer to just
get the plain literal title and then do proper shell variable handling
rather than the typical broken things people normally do. Of course
there is one issue that hasn't been addressed yet, which is newlines
in filenames. However, IMHO no program should bother supporting such a
broken practice as allowing newlines in filenames unless if somehow
needs to for security reasons.

Rich