On Tue, 01 Mar 2011 08:50:29 -0500, Nick Sabalausky wrote: > "Steven Schveighoffer" <schvei...@yahoo.com> wrote in message > news:op.vrn2pooteav7ka@steve-laptop... >> On Tue, 01 Mar 2011 08:13:33 -0500, Lars T. Kyllingstad >> <public@kyllingen.nospamnet> wrote: >> >>> On Tue, 01 Mar 2011 08:02:44 -0500, Steven Schveighoffer wrote: >>> >>>> On Tue, 01 Mar 2011 04:16:36 -0500, Jonathan M Davis >>>> <jmdavisp...@gmx.com> wrote: >>>> >>>>> I can understand if the path stuff >>>>> can't deal with / or \ in file names (that's probably not worth >>>>> trying to get to >>>>> work right), but it _should_ be able to handle directories with dots >>>>> in them and >>>>> files with no extension. >>>> >>>> / and \ are not legal in names on any filesystem that I know of. >>>> >>>> -Steve >>> >>> On a *NIX machine, try >>> >>> touch "c:\\foo\\bar" >>> >>> You may be surprised. ;) >> >> bleh... that seems useless :) I purposely checked FAT before posting, >> because I was sure Unix disallowed backslashes, I wanted to make sure >> FAT didn't allow slashes. >> >> Holy crap, something that DOS got right and Unix didn't! > > Windows also handles files/paths with spaces a hell of a lot better than > Unix. This, despite the fact that Unix technically allowed them long > before Windows did. (I don't mean this as OS-bashing.)
I really don't understand what you guys are talking about. If you encounter a filename with spaces, just enclose it in quotes or escape the spaces. If you encounter a filename with characters like *, \, etc, just escape them or enclose the filename in single quotes. And you only have to do the above when using a command-line shell. I just tried renaming a file to "c:\foo bar\*.baz" using the GNOME file manager and it worked perfectly, just like any other name. >> From this page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filename, it appears that >> really, the only disallowed character in unix filenames is '/'. Even >> '*' is allowed as a filename. How... horrible. Yeah, the only illegal filename characters are '/' and null. > I would actually feel very good to just simply not support such things. > If some unix user is going to use such awful filenames they can just > deal with the consequences. (And I'm *rarely* the kind of person to hold > such a viewpoint on software development matters.) If you have a bunch of "reserved characters", that means more special cases to worry about in code. I say it's better to allow as many characters as possible. -Lars