Subject: Re: Valid file-name characters
From: "David A. Cobb" <[email-masked]>
To: egor duda <[email-masked]>, Cygwin Discussion <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 22 Jul 2002 19:18:06 -0400

egor duda wrote:

>Hi!
>
>Saturday, 20 July, 2002 David A. Cobb [email-masked] wrote:
>
>DAC> Back in May (where I'm still trying to catch up) there was a discussion 
>DAC> starting at http://www.cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2002-05/msg01041.html 
>DAC> concerning a colon in a filename -- valid in *nix, not in Windows.  
>
>DAC> Also, we get repeated griping about the encoding of URI's in the local 
>DAC> package cache.  
>
>DAC> Would you consider a patch that translated filenames containing special 
>DAC> characters: the Cygwin user would see "aux:" but Windows would see 
>DAC> "aux%??" (I don't recall the encoding of colon)?
>
>The only problem here is what to do if cygwin user wants to create
>both aux: and aux%
>
>Egor.            mailto:[email-masked] ICQ 5165414 FidoNet 2:5020/496.19
>
"aux%3A" and "aux%25" respectively.  [ I did my homework, finally ]   
More problematical: if a user _enters_ NameWith%3CEscapes%3E,  should 
the program translate the escapes and try to use "NameWith<Escapes>", 
should it pass the user's string unchanged [my vote], or should it 
escape the '%' marks resulting in "NameWith%253CEscapes%253E" which is 
nearly too ugly for words.  That sounds silly, but there are many web 
pages around from folks who should know better where text somehow got 
encoded twice, resulting in [Quotemark] becoming first &quot; and then 
mangled into &amp;quot;

As an interesting datapoint: I used Mozilla today to download a file 
with SPACE in the name: perfectly OK in Windoze, a pain in *Nix;
Mozilla offered to save it as "This%20is%20the%20Name"   Not a good 
example to follow, IMNSHO, but it /is/ a name valid in both worlds.

It only makes sense to me to escape characters that are a real problem ( 
vs. a nuisance ) for one system or the other.  The ones I'm sure of in 
Windoz are the colon and slashes.  Would Linux, for example, allow a 
file with (shell-escapd) backslashes?  There are others, but I haven't 
done the research yet.

-- 
David A. Cobb, Software Engineer, Public Access Advocate
"By God's Grace I am a Christian man, by my actions a great sinner." -- The Way of a Pilgrim; R. M. French, tr.
Life is too short to tolerate crappy software.
.

--
Unsubscribe info:      http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
Bug reporting:         http://cygwin.com/bugs.html
Documentation:         http://cygwin.com/docs.html
FAQ:                   http://cygwin.com/faq/