Installed stock trading platform thinkorswim on 15.10 but confused why it worked

I'm fairly new to Linux and I have been trying to get this program to install and work correctly for about a day now but for reasons unknown to me it didn't work until I uninstalled java 8 and replaced it with java 7. Afterwards I followed the directions on this site, including this weird instruction:

When the wizard comes up be sure to install into the following directory: /usr/local/bin**“/thinkorswim”**

I don't know why the author of the post had thinkorswim in double-quotes but surprisingly everything worked. I now have a directory in usr/local/bin named:

bin"

and in that folder is another subdirectory called:

thinkorswim"

What's the purpose of the double-quotes in directory names and are they necessary?

2 Answers

I'm pretty sure that asterisks were some leftover formatting from some wiki probably (they are gone from the source site, you cited), and quotes were there just to emphasize the name...

Why it worked? - Well, double quotes are valid character in filename, you just need to be extra careful when operating on them, to properly escape. Since asterisks were not escaped, I guess, what happened, was that they were probably stripped by the installation script and so you end up with bin" (thing is, asterisks can also be used in filename, but I guess there was at least some sanitization on that input, pity, that it didn't left just a-zA-Z0-9_-. - rarely will you see anything else).

Anyway, I think, you should reinstall it if you want to be sure not to have any troubles running application from that path.

TLDR; it worked, because, in essence, there was no error...

UPDATE FOR RUNNING THINKORSWIM on UBUNTU!

On Saturday, January 23, 2016 TOS released Thinkorswim version 1880.62

This version solves multiple problems with trying to run TOS on Ubuntu primarily because it uses Java 8. If you are a TOS fan, try this:

1. update to Ubuntu 15.10

2. click the Open the Technical Notes link at the bottom of ThinkorSwim’s online help page:

   and scroll all the way to the bottom for instructions on how to update your Java from 7 to 8.

   I simply installed Java 8 using the following commands in the terminal:

    sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/java sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install oracle-java8-installer 

   and Set Java 8 as Default via:

    sudo apt-get install oracle-java8-set-default 

3. download the TOS Desktop from their download page & still in the terminal mode, change to the directory you downloaded TOS to and

    sudo sh ./thinkorswim_installer.sh 

Worked for me on 4 of 5 computers using 15.10. odd duck system will not put TOS Icon on desktop, but can be run from command line!

RE THE ODD DUCK -- discovered that by going back to JAVA 7 I could get the ICON, BUT tos would not run.. THEN installed JAVA 8 per the instructions above. RESULT: clicking ICON then produced update and sign in for TOS.