Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH] rev3: support colon in filenames

Jan Kiszka
2009-07-15T21:42:13Z

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Jamie Lokier wrote:
> Jan Kiszka wrote:
>>> Now, I see one significant hurdle with that: it's quite inconvenient
>>> for Windows users, typing paths like c:\path\to\dir\file, if those
>>> backslashes are stipped.
>> We could exclude Windows from this (I think to remember that filenames
>> are more restricted there anyway) or define a different, Windows-only
>> escape character.
>
> I think both of those are bad ideas, because the same management
> scripts can run on Windows, and for consistency it's not just file
> names. Even Windows has block devices and network devices :-)

I'm not sure if there is actually so much portability/reusability
between Windows and the rest of the universe, but I'm surely not an
expert in this.

>
> Fortunately "where <char> is not ASCII alphanumeric" solves the
> practical cases where the user types an ordinary pathname.
>
> Or the user can type forward slashes just like they do in unix.

We would still have to deal with the fact that so far '\' had no special
meaning on Windows - except that is was the well-known path separator.
So redefining its meaning would break a bit...

Jan

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