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Re: Valid file-name characters


egor duda wrote:

Hi!

Saturday, 20 July, 2002 David A. Cobb superbiskit@cox.net wrote:

DAC> Back in May (where I'm still trying to catch up) there was a discussion DAC> starting at http://www.cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2002-05/msg01041.html DAC> concerning a colon in a filename -- valid in *nix, not in Windows.
DAC> Also, we get repeated griping about the encoding of URI's in the local DAC> package cache.
DAC> Would you consider a patch that translated filenames containing special DAC> characters: the Cygwin user would see "aux:" but Windows would see DAC> "aux%??" (I don't recall the encoding of colon)?

The only problem here is what to do if cygwin user wants to create
both aux: and aux%

Egor. mailto:deo@logos-m.ru ICQ 5165414 FidoNet 2:5020/496.19

"aux%3A" and "aux%25" respectively. [ I did my homework, finally ] More problematical: if a user _enters_ NameWith%3CEscapes%3E, should the program translate the escapes and try to use "NameWith<Escapes>", should it pass the user's string unchanged [my vote], or should it escape the '%' marks resulting in "NameWith%253CEscapes%253E" which is nearly too ugly for words. That sounds silly, but there are many web pages around from folks who should know better where text somehow got encoded twice, resulting in [Quotemark] becoming first &quot; and then mangled into &amp;quot;

As an interesting datapoint: I used Mozilla today to download a file with SPACE in the name: perfectly OK in Windoze, a pain in *Nix;
Mozilla offered to save it as "This%20is%20the%20Name" Not a good example to follow, IMNSHO, but it /is/ a name valid in both worlds.

It only makes sense to me to escape characters that are a real problem ( vs. a nuisance ) for one system or the other. The ones I'm sure of in Windoz are the colon and slashes. Would Linux, for example, allow a file with (shell-escapd) backslashes? There are others, but I haven't done the research yet.

--
David A. Cobb, Software Engineer, Public Access Advocate
"By God's Grace I am a Christian man, by my actions a great sinner." -- The Way of a Pilgrim; R. M. French, tr.
Life is too short to tolerate crappy software.
.



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