There are a couple of bug reports on the Debian rsync package about problems with a recipient filesystem that can't cope with all possible unix filenames. Notably filenames with question marks are a problem... I guess that people are trying to backup systems to a SMB share which presumably is then regularly backupped to tape. This basically sounds like a reasonable thing to do :-)
Would there be much opposition to an option to mangle filenames if necessary? In its most trivial form, all characters besides a-zA-z0-9_.- would be mapped to e.g. _ . Of course, restoring these would be a lot of work, but at least the rsync transfer would work. In a later incarnation there might be different mappings, e.g. to a HTTP-like %XX notation (so space becomes %20, question mark becomes %3F, % becomes %25, etc.). The argument to the option could determine the mapping. Comments? Suggestions? What should the option be called? Paul Slootman -- To unsubscribe or change options: http://lists.samba.org/mailman/listinfo/rsync Before posting, read: http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html