John,
Whoa! Talk about obsessive;-).
But dude, isn't life just a little dull explicitly playing by
the rules? I honestly don't know how many, but I've had (in RH
6.0 & likely ~will~ have in mdk 7.2 after installing this
weekend) numerous files with spaces, exceeding 14 characters, &
even some illegal characters. I think the deal is to go with
what works. There's always time to fix stuff when things go bad.
How else do we learn?
Meph
> I've been around opsys's/opsyses (oh Hell what is the plural??)
of
> various flavours for nigh on 30 years - I've just spent an hour
> going through a bunch of manuals looking for filename
definitions
> - in every case the rules have been "Alphanumeric only" and
defines
> those characters as:
>
> A-Z, a-z, 0-9,
> and certain "punctuation characters" (tilde, underscore and
period)
>
> In 6 cases there is an explicit admonition _NOT_ to use the
SPACE
> character.
>
> On going back to "The Unix Programming Environment", I find
only two
> rules: (I can't find my copy of "The UNIX Programmers Manual")
>
> 1 A filename may consist of a maximum of 14 printable
characters
> 2 A filename may consist of almost any character - common sense
> says you should only use those which are printable.
>
> None of my *nix documentation actually tells which characters
are
> explicitly illegal but does say that 'certain' characters must
be
> 'handled' by means of 'escaping' but again I cannot find a
definition
> of those characters which require 'special handling'.
>
> An interesting subject this, particularly on a newbie list !! I
know
> that during these past 30-odd years, any tutoring/training etc
in
> which I have taken part (both provider or student) that the
space
> character should not be used in a filename.
>
> One manual suggests that a test for legality is whether the
output
> of program1 may be used as the input to program2 _WITHOUT_ the
need
> for special handling of the input to program2.
>
> Question arises out of all this as well, Does the UNIX
limitation of
> 14 character filenames apply to linux? I'm sure I've seen some
which
> 'appear' to have rather more...
>
> Cheers
> John
