40 lines
2.1 KiB
Markdown
40 lines
2.1 KiB
Markdown
# Infrequently Asked Questions
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No one but has asked these questions, but I'm giving answers anyway, mainly
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so I don't forget them in future.
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## Why didn't you use Punycode?
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[Punycode](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punycode) is a web standard for
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converting general Unicode text into ASCII, for use in domain names, and for
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nothing else. As the Wikipedia page says, it maps "München" to "Mnchen-3ya",
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which I personally find harder to understand than "M_Ufc_nchen". It also
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would add a dash to the end of pure
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[ASCII](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII) text, so "London" would become
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"London-", and its output does not handle characters that are bad for
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shells, like "?".
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## Why didn't you use `base64/32/16`?
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These are internet encoding standards used to convert any binary data to
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ASCII text, which sounds perfect for the job. However, their outputs are not
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human readable, and Owl is designed so that you will at least know roughly
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what the file was originally called.
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See <https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc4648.html#section-10> for examples.
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## Why not just `mmv`? Or `zsh`?
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[mmv](https://github.com/rrthomas/mmv) is command line tool to do a kind of
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"glob search and replace" with filenames. [zsh](https://zsh.sourceforge.io/)
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is a shell, Bash or the PowerShell, but it has a tool to do a similar thing
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called `zmv`. These require writing a regular expression of glob pattern to
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represent the changes you wish to make, which is fiddly work when what you
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want is to exclude potentially thousands of characters, not to mention
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potential issues with hidden files (a.k.a. "dot files") and shell globbing.
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### Other alternatives
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- <https://github.com/DDR0/fuseblk-filename-fixer>: This actually does
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pretty much what Owl does, but is more specialised to its author's needs.
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## Tree
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This is used for testing. It should be available on any Linux system from
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your distribution's repositories. If not, the source code can be downloaded
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from the GitLab repository at
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<https://gitlab.com/OldManProgrammer/unix-tree> or from the home page of the
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project at <https://oldmanprogrammer.net/source.php?dir=projects/tree>.
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