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Q&A Are there any legitimate uses for newlines in filenames?

Although this would be bad design for other reasons, I can imagine a situation where a field from one file or database can be used as a file name. Imagine something like value="$(mysql -e 'select ...

posted 1y ago by terdon‭

Answer
#1: Initial revision by user avatar terdon‭ · 2023-06-23T12:15:31Z (over 1 year ago)
Although this would be bad design for other reasons, I can imagine a situation where a field from one file or database can be used as a file name. Imagine something like 

```
value="$(mysql -e 'select value from table')"
touch -- "$value"
```

This could then be used as some sort of misguided sanity check, or to re-populate the database or something like that. Yes, it's stretching it, but I can't really think of any reasonable reasons to have tabs, or backslashes or any special characters in filenames either, so if we consider some weird characters normal, why not newlines as well?