Eric, et al, On Wed, 2020-06-17 at 08:26 +0100, Mike Fleetwood wrote: > On Wed, 17 Jun 2020 at 07:16, Eric L. Zolf <ewl+rdiffbac...@lavar.de> > wrote: > > Hi, > > > > in the course of the review of PR #404 we came to challenge the > > quite > > complex quoting rules allowed when you backup to/from a remote > > location. > > > > Our question is if anybody is relying on those (too) complex > > quoting > > rules to make their backup work? Else it'll allow us to radically > > simplify the code. > > > > More details: if you backup to/from a remote site, the description > > is of > > the form `host::path` (e.g. `rdiff-backup /home > > myuser@myhost::/srv/backup/homebak`), and the current quoting > > allows to > > have the double colons (::) somewhere in the `host` or `path` part > > of > > the remote description. And the question is if anybody knows of a > > concrete use case for this possibility? > > > > For even more gory details, the man page states the quoting rules > > in the > > REMOTE OPERATION section. > > > > Thanks, Eric > > > > PS: and yes, double colons are a valid POSIX path part (`touch ::` > > works), but who really needs it? > > > > https://github.com/rdiff-backup/rdiff-backup/pull/404 > > It looks like colon is not a valid character in a host name so that > shouldn't be used anywhere.
Not in the hostname, no. But colons _do_ occur in file names. As a concrete example, on a recent Linux box '/sys/bus/pci/devices' contains symbolic links named like '000:00:00.0'. So, when I do a "full system backup" I may well have filenames with colons. > > https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3523028/valid-characters-of-a-hostname > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hostname > Cheers Leland -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Leland C. Best | Creationists make it sound as though a 'theory' is lcbpub...@gmail.com | something you dreamt up after being drunk all night. | -- Isaac Asimov -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
