It's a fair point. I think the best solution would be for shells to have two modes - interactive and batch mode. Batch mode would require strict quoting.

Alternatively it could let you type without quotes and then automatically quote it for you (e.g. you press shift-enter and it auto-quotes it).

It's fine for interactive use because you can debug errors when they happen. The issue is with scripts.

Sometimes you need to deliberately not quote, though. For example, an output of a program might be a list of files, which I then might want to operate on using "for filename in $files". If I do this then I must have a guarantee that the files do not have spaces in them, but this is usually not a particularly onerous requirement for a closed system that doesn't have untrusted filename inputs. Splitting data using text separated by whitespace is part of the essence of Unix (see TAOUP). If you want to ban this kind of thing too, then you might as well not permit shell scripting at all.

That’s what xargs, preferable with -0, is for.

The problem with “works most of the time” is that it stops working when you’re not around. So it might be fine for a one-off shell command, but you never know what the next guy will pass into it.

> you might as well not permit shell scripting at all

Generally a good idea if you care about bugs at all.

Yeah, something like "use strict" for scripting mode would be nice sometimes.