When you are naming files with multiple words in the name, is it more common in Unix systems to use underscores, camel case, or dashes to separate the words?
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When I'm naming them? Space. – Random832 Sep 24 '12 at 15:34
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8Traditional Unix commands and files don't tend to have more than one word at all. Most are a few letters. For your own files it is really up to you. I avoid spaces because they are a pain to deal with on the command line. The POSIX portable file name character set is quite restricted: alphanumeric, dot, underscore, and dash. – jw013 Sep 24 '12 at 15:39
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As opposed to which naming method? – Karlson Sep 24 '12 at 16:38
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1This question may be interesting. – Sep 24 '12 at 19:46
1 Answers
51
On one of my random systems:
$ find /usr/bin -xdev -type f -name '*-*' | wc -l # hyphen
1019
$ find /usr/bin -xdev -type f -name '*_*' | wc -l # underscore
311
$ find /usr/bin -xdev -type f -name '*[a-z][A-Z][a-z]*' | wc -l # camelcase
2
$ find /usr/bin -xdev -type f -name '* *' | wc -l # space
0
Your mileage may vary. There's a lot of personal preference involved -- my home directory is probably very much skewed towards hyphens, because underscore and camelcase involves shifting, and space has difficulties with quoting.
Jim Paris
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