Luc

Scripting isn’t the issue, but for tab completion: the boundary is often at a space or parenthesis so that you need to type the backslash + char to continue tabbing to completion

Now I’m imagining a shell that looks iteratively through arguments to find where quotes would make total sense

$ ls
my victims.ods
$ wipe -f my victims.ods --thorough

So the shell would go like

1. wipe → command name found, ok
2. -f → no file in the current directory starts with that, skip
3. my → matches a file, keep in memory…
4. my victims.ods → full match, but missing quotes!
5. Prompt user:

Filename "my victims.ods" found without quotes. Choose:
[a]dd quotes this time
[A]lways add quotes (dangerous)
[n]o quotes today please
[N]ever offer adding quotes again
[t]ell me what could possibly go wrong when I choose to always add quotes
[P]unch the person who proposed this feature

the problem solves itself (unless you are very desperate)

Have you seen dating sites? When the market is such that one side can clearly pick whoever they want, not everyone has the luxury (good looks for dating / relevant experience for jobs) to not play ball

And here I thought it was referring to the small print on the inside. Then it hit me.