Oh, come on!

First, we hear that UNIX can't hack spaces in file names. Then we're
told that UNIX can't hack USENET articles posted by people with angle
brackets in their name. Now we hear that UNIX can't hack file names
with parentheses in them.

All of this is completely untrue. It may be that there is some
specific software, running under some UNIX or other, that has problems
like this, but then that software is buggy, and should be fixed. The
only character you can't have in a UNIX file name is the forward slash
('/'), because it's used as a directory separator. The funny name
with the graphical arrow in it was completely legal, as well, and
should pose no problem to any properly working news or email software.

However, if you want to be sure you use file names portable to
anything, stick to file names of maximum eight characters picked from
the letters A-Z and digits 0-9, then a single period ('.'), then a
maximum of three characters picked from the same set. These file
names will be MS-DOS compatible, and will also work on anything else
that's less than about 30 years old. :-)

-tih
--
Tom Ivar Helbekkmo, Senior System Administrator, EUnet Norway
www.eunet.no T: +47-22092958 M: +47-93013940 F: +47-22092901