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Re: Bash (under Cygwin) problem with colon


Philip Peake <philip <at> vogon.net> writes:

> 
> The colon (:) character appears to be being misinterpreted.

That's Windows for you!

> 
> As an example:
> 
>    $  > xxx:yyy

On Windows 9x, that is an invalid file name.  On NT class machines, that is a 
command to create an alternate stream (google this list for prior discussion on 
the matter).  In short, : is not a valid Windows filename character, because 
Windows treats it as a trigger for special-casing.  It is not bash's fault: 
bash is not handling it as a comment, but is just passing the string "xxx:yyy" 
unchanged through to Windows' file handling routines.  A managed mount might 
help you out in this case, but in general, filenames designed to be portable to 
multiple systems MUST NOT contain a colon.

-- 
Eric Blake
volunteer cygwin bash maintainer



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