(DoN. Nichols) writes:

No -- what I am saying is that these names are problems to the
*shell* -- the command-line interpreter, which makes it awkward to
*type* such filenames.

That an application that uses the shell has to be conscious of the
special meanings of various characters, and quote things in a safe
manner, is not a problem. Applications handle that. If they don't,
they're buggy.

[shell 101 snipped]

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.

You are trying to tell me that the original Bourne shell
(/bin/sh), and all subsequent ones that I have encountered, are buggy?
The shells *are* the user interface of unix.

Of course that's not what I'm saying. Neither /bin/sh nor the other
shells have problems with the fact that all characters except the
slash are legal. Neither do well-written applications. Applications
that have problems with this are buggy.

There is one other forbidden character -- the NULL character

Of course -- but I didn't want to start discussing inode internals... ;-)

And actually, there *is* one way to put '/' in a filename on
unix -- at least on Sun servers running NFS (Networked File System),
offering file systems to the Macintosh.

Now *there* is an example of a buggy application.

Note that many unix newsreaders are descendants of rn (trn and
my current strn as prime examples). rn (and descendants) uses shell
scripts to accomplish many things -- including saving articles --
normally by appending them to a file named for the newsgroup. I make a
practice to save articles which I have read in this way.

Do you know of any news groups that have magic characters in their
names? I don't.

Unfortunately, when the shell script sees characters like '(',
')', '', '', or similar (in this case in either the "From: " or
"Reply-To: " headers -- even though it is not creating a file name from
them, it *is* checking them -- it attempts to use normal shell syntax
rules on them -- and barfs.

If rn actually shoves this stuff to the shell without proper quoting,
then rn is buggy. I'm almost tempted to put a ";halt" into my "From:"
field just for kicks... ;-)

....which reminds me of a funny one-line .signature I saw once:

SCRIPT Language="Javascript"window.close()/SCRIPT

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