@EliahKagan O.O yeah I see things in Linux magazines.......

In magazines?

@EliahKagan yes terrible things! I will see if I can find something by picking one at random from the pile

Thanks. I'm afraid of what you'll show me...

I have sometimes pressed my finger down on a word written in a print book or on a piece of paper with the hope that a definition will appear.

@EliahKagan XD

In the past I've tried to check all my old answers, like start from the oldest one, and check 2 or 3 every day until I've been through all of them, but this takes too long now :S

What's that from? And did you write a letter to the editor? Or is this like from the 80s?

@EliahKagan lol it's from a publication called "Linux Magazine", January 2017 issue. (Seriously, I have been tempted to write to the editor of this mag several times by such things, but I have a lot of experience being ignored or dismissed when I try to point out technical issues, from plumbing to programming. Maybe I should try signing off with a masculine name...)

Hmm. I've heard of "Linux Magazine" (though maybe there is more than one magazine by that name, I don't know). I'm sorry to hear this... especially if they're disregarding your concerns based on sexist assumptions!

I guess you could try a masculine-sounding anagram or something. :) That seems like jumping through too many hoops to get them to do what they should just be doing anyway. This is up to you of course! ...But in service of the general goal of getting people to not write shell scripts like that, perhaps self-answered questions about such code (or even that exact code with a citation?) would be useful.

If it covers something we don't already have good questions and answers about here, then I would be interested in posting something like that.

(perhaps I too readily make assumptions of sexism :) I certainly don't have any problems with that around here)

haha you're right, I think that could elicit some good answers

Without more info I'd say, who knows. People fail to address problems for many bad reasons, so in this case I can't really guess the reason. In general I do think sexism is a problem that skews the way ideas and criticisms are judged in tech today, though, so it doesn't seem like an unlikely possibility.

Either way though, I suspect there's not much more that can be done to discourage such bad script examples if the editors won't even add warnings about word splitting, publish letters, or reply to readers' concerns in a way that makes the readers feel like they should keep reading and (I don't know the magazine's business model but) giving money to the magazine.

Regarding the technical issue in the example... I think the only situation where anyone familiar with shell scripting would be tempted to use a method like that would be to avoid numerous file invocations, but that only matters if there's a huge number of files...

...And in that case, it hardly seems like they could know they're named in a way that doesn't cause problems, especially since this is a situation where they don't even have reasonable suffixes that can be relied on as indicators that they are JPEG images!

What bothers me is that I could easily correct these things because I know something about how to use shell things in sane ways and how to get help if I need to, but other people might trustingly enter this stuff... and this magazine also has tutorials for languages that I'm clueless about and I daren't try them haha

haha yeah we can't trust them to be for f in *.jpg *.jpeg *.JPG *.JPEG, we'll have to use file in case they're named ( ){}[]!;\'

Perhaps each JPEG file is named with an ASCII art representation of the image it contains.

;)\

;)\ ? I've heard some people name their JPEG images like that. :D

lol