On Tuesday, February 26, 2002, at 01:34 PM, Chris Hewitt wrote:
>> I am wondering if there is anywhere a list of characters which are not
>> allowed in a unix file name.
>>
>> I gues somethin like ' or \ is not allowed, but what else?
> My old "Teach Yourself Unix" book makes it:
> !@#$%^&()[]'"?\|;<>`+- space tab backspace
> though it says technically some could be used but might cause problems.
As a general rule, filenames should only ever be composed of the
following characters:
letters (A-Z and a-z)
numbers (0-9)
underscorese (_)
hyphens (-)
dots (.)
Surely there will be some disagreement with this, but it's our policy
where I work to make certain that filenames can only be composed of
these characters. I even have the CMS I'm designing set so that
nonconformant filenames are not allowed, with a message explaining why.
The characters to be especially careful to avoid are:
forward-slashes (/)
backslashes (\)
quotes (')
doublequotes (")
colons (:)
spaces ( )
The slashes are usually filesystem hierarchic delimiters on Windows and
Unix, as is the colon on pre-OS 9 Mac filesystems. Quotes and
doublequotes are usually used to escape command line strings, so they
can cause confusion (note that this includes singlequotes used as
apostrophes, like "John'spicture.jpg"). It's not that you can't use
quotes, but it forces the person manipulating them to be very careful
about how they refer to the filename. Likewise, spaces need to be
escaped, so they're a bad idea.
This is just my opinion, but I'm sure others will agree.
Erik
----
Erik Price
Web Developer Temp
Media Lab, H.H. Brown
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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