Re: (emacs+unix): How to have a file-name containing slashes, angle-brackets, etc?

[Nikolaj Schumacher <me@nschum.de>]

Xah <xahlee@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Aug 24, 5:31 am, Nikolaj Schumacher <m...@nschum.de> wrote:
>> Xah<xah...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> > Unix is the worst, they pretty much just allow
>> > alphanumerics and not even space. If you have anything like “,=();
>> > \'"~&-” etc, you can expect most shell tools to erase you disk)
>>
>> Actually unix systems allow pretty much every character except / and the
>> null character.
>
> To say that unix allows much wider chars in file names is like saying
> mud is the best medium for sculpture.

No, actually its not like that at all.  That would be an opinion, while
I stated a (verifiable/refutable) fact.

> Unix file names, for much of its history up to perhaps mid 2000s,
> effectively just allows alphanumerics plus hyphen “-” and underscore
> “_”.

According to Wikipedia, EXT2 (1993) supports all characters.  Older data
is harder to find.

What do you mean by the vague term "effectively"?

> Sure, you can use many non-alphanumeric chars besides hyphen and
> underscore in unix, but the system is simply not designed for it.

Please explain where the design falls short.

> Majority of unix tools, including file name listing, will chock and
> break if your filename contain these chars. The chocking doesn't
> actually give you a nice error message, but silently break and often
> resulting in unexpected and unpredicable behavior. In short, it's just
> not designed for it.

$ touch "=;\\'\"~&-“,$#\!*()” ™®©£¢≈∫µ∂ƒπ≠≤≥∞«»¡†‡°çö"
$ ls
=;\'"~&-“,0\!*()” ™®©£¢≈∫µ∂ƒπ≠≤≥∞«»¡†‡°çö
$ rm "=;\\'\"~&-“,$#\!*()” ™®©£¢≈∫µ∂ƒπ≠≤≥∞«»¡†‡°çö"

No problem there.



regards,
Nikolaj Schumacher