Author Topic: Unfortunate filename choices  (Read 572 times)

Neil Waldhauer

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Unfortunate filename choices
« on: November 23, 2025, 08:58:37 pm »
Due to some careless cut and paste, I recently named a file with a leading space. This can make it difficult to manipulate on the command line. I'm sure there are some other non-obvious bad filename choices.
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Tom

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Re: Unfortunate filename choices
« Reply #1 on: November 23, 2025, 09:21:12 pm »
Put quotes around that filename-with-a-leading-space when including it on a commandline

Dave Yeo

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Re: Unfortunate filename choices
« Reply #2 on: November 23, 2025, 10:54:06 pm »
IIRC, JFS itself supports all characters except the colon. OS/2, or perhaps just cmd.exe, also disallows \ as it is the directory separator, as well as / and silently ignores ".
lots of utf8 chars that would be hard to manipulate on the cmd line.
I learned on an Apple II+ clone, you could enter any ASCII character except DEL (used as the cursor) with the keyboard and could use CTRL characters in a file name. Could have a file name like foo^H^H^Hbar which would look like bar in a directory listing and very hard to manipulate from the command line if you didn't know about the CTRL-H's.