Roland Illig wrote:

> Would that mean that _all_ NetBSD utilities, even cat(1), would have to
> be rewritten to never output control characters when that is not
> expected? What would be the correct error message if a file whose name
> contains special characters cannot be found?

Yes.

> cat: a file, whose name I won't show you due to security restrictions,
> could not be found.

There is prior art here, courtesy of Microsoft.

"The operation could not be completed because an error occurred."

You should be happy that you were even told there was an error. You
don't need to know the filename, nor the nature of the error, nor in
fact which operation you were doing, because that would be insecure. Or
confusing. Or both.

-- 
Gillette - the best a man can forget