On Thu, 21 Aug 2014, Chris Barker wrote:
so they are "just byte strings", oh, except that you can't have a null, and the "slash" had better be code 47 (and vice versa). How is that different than "bytes-in-some-arbitrary-encoding-where-at-least the-slash-character-is-ascii-compatible"?
Actually, slash doesn't need to be code 47. But no matter what code 47 means outside of the context of a filename, it is the path arc separator byte (not character).
In fact, this isn't even entirely academic. On a Mac OS X machine, go into Finder and try to create a directory called ":". You'll get an error saying 'The name “:” can’t be used.'. Now create a directory called "/". No problem, raising the question of what is going on at the filesystem level?
Answer: $ ls -al total 0 drwxr-xr-x 3 ijmorlan staff 102 21 Aug 18:57 ./ drwxr-xr-x+ 80 ijmorlan staff 2720 21 Aug 18:57 ../ drwxr-xr-x 2 ijmorlan staff 68 21 Aug 18:57 :/ And of course in shell one would remove the directory with this: rm -rf : not: rm -rf /So in effect the file system path arc encoding on Mac OS X is UTF-8 *except* that : is outlawed and / is encoded as \x3A rather than the usual \x2F. Of course, the path arc separator byte (not character) remains \x2F as always.
Just for fun, there are contexts in which one can give a full path at the GUI level, where : is used as the path separator. This is for historical reasons and presumably is the reason for the above-noted behaviour.
I think the real tension here is between the POSIX level where filenames are byte strings (except for \x00, which is reserved for string termination) where \x2F has special interpretation, and absolutely every application ever written, in every language, which wants filenames to be character strings.
Isaac Morland CSCF Web Guru DC 2554C, x36650 WWW Software Specialist
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