If you work in IT, as a UNIX® Sysadmin, a software developer, or even a manager, there a few skills that will set you apart from the crowd. Do you fully understand the OSI model? Are you comfortable with subnetting? Do you understand UNIX permissions? Let me add to this list the humble command line tool. By the end of this article, anyone involved in IT at any capacity should be able to create at least a simple command line tool.
Traditionally, Unix/Linux/POSIX filenames can be almost any sequence of bytes, and their meaning is unassigned. The only real rules are that "/" is always the directory separator, and that filenames can't contain byte 0 (because this is the terminator). Although this is flexible, this creates many unnecessary problems. In particular, this lack of limitations makes it unnecessarily difficult to write correct programs (enabling many security flaws), makes it impossible to consistently and accurately display filenames, causes portability problems, and confuses users. more ....
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