+1
On 2020-09-30 7:59 AM, Charles Mills wrote:
Applications should not "validate" filenames before attempting to open or
create a file. Present the name to the file system API and report any error back to the
user. Application filename validation is what leads to these inconsistencies.
Charles
-----Original Message-----
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On Behalf
Of Paul Gilmartin
Sent: Tuesday, September 29, 2020 3:58 PM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: Re: blanks at the end of Unix file names - was LMINIT cannot handle
concatenation with more than 16 data sets?
On Tue, 29 Sep 2020 21:28:26 +0000, Pommier, Rex wrote:
Serious question - what would be the purpose for doing this? I know you can,
I'm just trying to grasp a good reason for doing so. Security by obscurity
(not valid in my mind)?
Because it's possible. Someone will do it. Test suites should verify
that other components support it properly. The security needn't be
by obscurity. The security product or ACLs could enforce chosen
rules.
To minimize programmer astonishment the syntax and semantics
should be uniform throughout the system. I have a couple experiences
older than OMVS.
I used ISPF LM services to create some PDS members with hyphens
in their names, e.g. FOO-BAR. Subsequently I decided to add ISPF
statistics to such members with LMMSTATS. LMMSTATS deems the
hyphen a syntax error.
Similarly, I once created a data set such as:
DD DISP=(NEW,CATLG),DSN=hlq.X.FOO-BAR
No problem. Later, I tried
DD DISP=(NEW,CATLG),DSN=hlq.Y.FOO-BAR,
DCB=hlq.X.FOO-BAR
Again, the hyphen caused a syntax error. The restriction is
documented, but why not be uniform?
As long as STOW and BLDL have existed they have supported
mixed-case member names. But most high-level user interfaces
aren't even case-insensitive: they don't find any member name
containing lower case characters. An IBM employee has said
on this list that those names are invalid. But why doesn't STOW
report them as errors.
I disagree with Emerson about consistency.
<stripped from the other thread>
Alas, the padding and stripping mean that 'WOMBAT', 'WOMBAT ', and 'WOMBAT
',
distinct UNIX files, would be conflated.
-- gil
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