On Fri, Oct 8, 2010 at 10:19 AM, Troy Rollo <t...@parrycarroll.com.au> wrote: > On Friday 08 October 2010 08:03:32 DaZZa wrote: >> perhaps most >> importantly, (l)user has been attacked with seriously large clue stick >> and told to not do it again! > > Why? The only "illegal" characters in file names on a UNIX or Linux file > system > (including ext2 and ext3) are the forward slash (because it is the path > separator) and NUL (because it is the string terminator). Everything else is > perfectly legitimate to use (including having a file named "-rf *", which > would > only catch a very careless remover of the file)
Because the over-lying system which interacts with the Unix filesystem doesn't deal with filenames which begin with a -. it breaks essential functionality when manipulating the files from the higher layer program. DaZZa -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
