Subject: Re: Valid file-name characters
From: egor duda <[email-masked]>
To: "Robert Collins" <[email-masked]>
Cc: [email-masked], "'David A. Cobb'" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 22 Jul 2002 13:48:00 +0400

Hi!

Monday, 22 July, 2002 Robert Collins [email-masked] wrote:

>> RC> I was just about to suggest that whatever character is used is used as
>> RC> an escape char rather than a literal replacement.
>> 
>> RC> i.e. 
>> RC> WIN32      CYGWIN
>> 'aux%c' ->> 'aux:'
>> 'aux%%' ->> 'aux%'
>> 
>> which means that
>> 
>> s='a%%'
>> touch $s
>> notepad $s
>> 
>> won't work.

RC> Unless cygwin detects that notepad is a non cygwin program, and therefor
RC> needs the on-disk name.

Even if cygwin knows that notepad is native program it can't tell for
sure if a%% is name of disk file. It may be a name of my dog to be
told from my computer speakers, for instance. An he surely won't like
if i misspell his name ;-)

RC> With 
'aux%' ->> 'aux:'

RC> s='aux:'
RC> touch $s
RC> notepad $s

RC> won't work either - unless cygwin detects that notepad...

That's exactly my point. Having some fancy rules for filename encoding
breaks interoperability with native tools. Escaping non-valid
characters like ':' is not big problem, since native tools can't use
such names anyway. But messing with valid characters like '%' is far
more dangerous and error-prone.

Egor.            mailto:[email-masked] ICQ 5165414 FidoNet 2:5020/496.19

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