OS2 World Community Forum

Public Discussions => General Discussion => Topic started by: Neil Waldhauer on November 23, 2025, 08:58:37 pm

Title: Unfortunate filename choices
Post by: Neil Waldhauer 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.
Title: Re: Unfortunate filename choices
Post by: Tom on November 23, 2025, 09:21:12 pm
Put quotes around that filename-with-a-leading-space when including it on a commandline
Title: Re: Unfortunate filename choices
Post by: Dave Yeo 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.