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] -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php