Re: Unwanted commas in file and directory names

From: Laurenz Albe (albe_at_culturallNOSPAM.com)
Date: 12/23/04 

Date: Thu, 23 Dec 2004 11:40:38 +0000 (UTC)

fritz-bayer@web.de wrote:
> Sometimes, when directory or filenames get displayed, commas appear in
> the beginning of the name.
>
> I can reproduce it. Here is an example:
>
> test@debian:~/tmp/test$ mkdir testdir.txt
> test@debian:~/tmp/test$ rm testdir.txt/
> rm: Entfernen von ,,testdir.txt/" nicht möglich: Ist ein Verzeichnis

Very likely this is a misunderstanding.
In German there are two kinds of quotation marks: those that start the
quotation and are written on the baseline, and those that end the
quotation and are written on top, as in English.

As you use German as your locale, and since there are no lower quotation
marks in US ASCII, I assume that whoever translated the message used
two commas (,,) to represent a lower double quotation mark.

Thus, the correct translation of the error message would be:

rm: Cannot remove "testdir.txt": is a directory

And this is indeed the mesage I would expect, as you cannot remove a
directory with rm unless you use the -r flag.

So it seems that everything is ok.

Your mileage may vary, but I will always install and use the default
locale on any computer unless I have urgent reasons to use something
else: as this example shows, you run into all kinds of additional
trouble, and end up misunderstanding the (perhaps badly) translated
messages.
For me it is not obvious that e.g. a "Befehlsschaltfläche" should be
translated back to "button".

Yours,
Laurenz Albe

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