Hi, Thank you Barry for your research!
Here is how I see things. The anomymous, untitled NTFS developer (junior, senior, etc?) wrote that "as far as I know" and "0x3F is explicitly reserved as a wild card for NTFS on Windows and is explicitly blocked from being used in a file name.". The first part is not a reliable technical reply and the second one is too vague and suspicious since Unix also has many wild cards, still none of its file systems reserve and block them in filenames. It also doesn't make sense, since Microsoft claims NTFS is POSIX which should mean only '\0' and '/' are disallowed [*]. I'm also aware that there is at least one way to bypass filename restricting filetering but I don't know what cases it covers and on what level it happens. Larry Osterman gave no technical explanation but submiting a chkdsk bug report is very much appreciated. I'm waiting for the outcome. Is it possible to follow it somewhere and get a notification when a fix is released if it's done? > I got another reply from the other developer I contacted, Malcom Smith: Thanks. Unfortunately I also can't find any information about him. Please dont' get me wrong, I don't mean this is a bad thing but we don't make changes without strong, credible backing and fully understanding the technical background and its consequences. > On Thu, 13 Mar 2008 23:12:25 -0700, "Malcolm Smith (NTFS)" > > > This is interesting. I did some research and it turns out that the > > NTFS driver will fail creates/opens with wildcards (ie., you can't > > bypass Win32 and do this.) I don't understand how Win32 comes to the picture. The issue is only NTFS and POSIX. > > If Windows interop is a primary criteria for NTFS-3G, The primary criteria is NTFS POSIX interoperibility. If Microsoft can't fulfill this then they either should fix their POSIX compatibility or not to claim it. [*] Here I tried to find Microsoft references and ... I couldn't find. The wikipedia says at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS "Allowed characters in filenames: In Posix namespace, any UTF-16 code unit (case sensitive) except U+0000 (NUL) and / (slash)." Obviously this wasn't written by Microsoft. What does Microsoft say? http://technet2.microsoft.com/windowsserver/en/library/8cc5891d-bf8e-4164-862d-dac5418c59481033.mspx?mfr=true "POSIX Compliance NTFS provides a several features to support the Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX) standard, ... NTFS includes the following POSIX-compliant features. ..." I think the subtitle can be indeed misunderstood, which may make somebody believe in POSIX conformance when in fact it's only partial compliance as explained later on. And here is our problem. Windows is massively plagued with all kind of security problems by viruses, root kits etc which exploit Windows shortcomings to hide themself. The open source NTFS-3G is widely used in security softwares because it can access and remove them. You're asking to drop the above highly important feature to become compatible with the non-POSIX complaint NT "POSIX" subsystem. That won't be easy but I'll think about it ... If chkdsk is "fixed" then we should revise this issue. Thanks again, Szaka ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2008. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse0120000070mrt/direct/01/ _______________________________________________ ntfs-3g-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/ntfs-3g-devel
