Hi, There are a number of special characters that cannot be used in filenames on the NTFS filesystem, this includes backslash (\), slash (/), colon (:), asterisk (*), question mark (?), double-quote ("), less- and greater-than (<>), and pipe (|). In contrast, most Unix systems only prevent the use of slash characters in filenames themselves, since that is used as the separator between levels in directory hierarchy. I like to listen to music while at work, where I run Windows with Cygwin. I periodically like to use 'scp' (secure copy, from the SSH suite) to download music from my home computer, where I run Linux. Some of my music files at home have special characters in them (in particular, colon, question mark, and double-quote have appeared most frequently). When I attempt to use scp to download a file with one of these characters in the name, it appears that an open() or write() function fails with the error "No such file or directory." Is there a way to get scp to convert the filename to something that can be written to disk? For example, either removing the characters from the filename or converting them to underscores would work fine for me. A system-wide option would be great, perhaps controlled by an environment variable or two. Otherwise, each program that can write files from foreign sources would have to be rewritten. It would also be an improvement to see a more descriptive error than "No such file or directory", though I suppose developers would be hesitant to expand upon the standard list of error types. As a workaround, I find it is easiest to create a zip file on my home system with the files I want to transfer, then simply unzip it on my work machine. Cygwin's 'unzip' utility appears to handle this situation correctly and will convert unusable characters to underscores. I've tried doing the same thing with a tar file, but 'tar' exhibits the same problems as 'scp' and will not write files that originally had a special character in the name. Apologies if there's already a good method for handling this situation (other than renaming my original files, thanks). I did a requisite Google search and some thumbing through man pages, but didn't come across anything (though that doesn't mean there wasn't anything there...). Thanks. -- Mike Hicks [EMAIL PROTECTED] Associate Test Engineer Secure Computing, St. Paul, MN
-- Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/