Re: RFC: Illegal Characters in File Names

[Jan-Benedict Glaw <jbglaw@lug-owl.de>]

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On Tue, 2004-07-20 11:25:48 -0500, Joseph D. Wagner <theman@josephdwagner.info>
wrote in message <20040720162549.857014B7E7@dvmwest.gt.owl.de>:
> > See, it's only a question of *display*.
> 
> No, it's not.  Some programs use file names as input.  Placing a
> timestamp directly in the file name comes to mind, but I'm sure you
> can think of many other examples.  Control characters in these file

What't wrong with creating a strftime()'d filename? That's still
permitted if you allow not-easily-displayable characters.

> names would screw-up these programs.  While you're going to argue

They need to properly check their input. If they don't, they're broken
by definition.

> that a program should anticipate malformed data, I'm going to argue
> that application development will be easier for Linux is programmers
> knew that those characters aren't going to be there.

Application development with C isn't easy. It needs quite some skills to
do The Right Thing (TM). I think that a good program is made up from
about some 20% of working code and 80% of error handling.

I've seen mission-critical apps that do near-no error checking
(including input checking and the like), but you get what you pay for.

What do you want to tell all those people that *rely* on being able to
store chars < 0x20 in filenames, or > 0x7f ?

> Where do most Linux programmers come from?  Sure there's the same

>From C land. And those writing good applications already learned
the basics.

> core of people who have been programming Linux for years, but the
> new ones are coming from Windows platforms.  Which is easier: to

Windows, and previously DOS, allowed for strange filenames, too.

> reeducate every single new Linux programmer that any character
> could appear in a file name, or to cut out some of the characters
> that don't make sense?

Ever tried to read a russion DOS floppy disk in a US-english Windows
PeeCee? Ever thought about UTF8 or UTF32?

These days, you can't even be sure that one char is one displayed
character *at all*. ...and while we're hard working (though slowly)
getting towards multi-character encodings, you try to propose not using
the full 8 bits available per byte?

Get real: Some lazy Ex-Windows programmers first need to properly
learn programming in the sense of not "make this work", but "make this
to never break". You can't trust in anything, except "input *can*
actually be even *worse* than this bullshit my customer just showed
me."

MfG, JBG

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