Re: RFC: Illegal Characters in File Names

[Matthew Wilcox <willy@debian.org>]

On Sun, Jul 18, 2004 at 07:41:32PM -0500, Joseph Wagner wrote:
> Some of us in the e2fsprogs project are considering a change which would 
> mark all non-printing control characters (i.e. ASCII <=31 and ASCII == 127) 
> as illegal.

Where are "we" considering this?  I didn't see any discussion on
ext2-devel.

Possibly it would be of interest to include a utf8 converter in e2fsck
like the -s option, but it'd have to be something like -u iso-8859-1 so
it knows what it's converting from.  and then it'd be wrong for various
directory hierarchies because the filenames in /home/dostoyevsy are in
8859-5 but those in /home/kant are in 8859-1.  Since this can be done by
a separate tool that just renames files (hmm, symlinks will be tricky ;-),
it probably shouldn't be done in e2fsck.

Maybe a -u option that checks all filenames are in utf8 would be useful,
but "repairing" them?  How would you do that?  I do see the utility of
checking for non-printing characters as they're normally only inserted
by accident.  But this could be done by a cronjob (like locatedb) rather
than putting more functionality into e2fsck.

-- 
"Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon 
the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those
conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse
to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince 
himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep 
he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception." -- Mark Twain