dot files in Windows and [LWN.net]

dot files in Windows and

Posted Mar 25, 2009 23:09 UTC (Wed) by pr1268 (guest, #24648)
In reply to: Wheeler: Fixing Unix/Linux/POSIX Filenames by mrshiny
Parent article: Wheeler: Fixing Unix/Linux/POSIX Filenames

Windows has no problem with files starting with a dot.

Oddly enough, Windows will not allow the name of a directory to end in a dot. I discovered this when, back in my Windows days, I had to name an artist directory R.E.M without a final dot. Windows wouldn't allow me to put that trailing dot in the file name. Go figure. Linux doesn't have any issue with it (and since I've abandoned Windows on my home computers, I was able to rename the directory to include that dot).

Going off on a tangent: here are some files in my music directory which would make Mr. Wheeler cringe:

Beatles/Help!/01_-_Help!.ogg ('!' in directory and file names)
Donald_Fagen/The_Nightfly/01_-_I.G.Y..ogg (two dots before the file extension - not really an issue but interesting)
Sugar_Ray/14:59/ (':' in directory name)
Coldplay/X&Y/ ('&' in directory name)
John_Cage/4'33".ogg (single- and double-quotes - never mind that this is a really quiet song :) )
Radiohead/Hail_To_The_Theif/01_-_2_+_2_=_5_(The_Lukewarm.).ogg (A whole bunch of issues here)

In a digital forensics class the professor had us searching through a filesystem that contained directories named "..." (minus quotes). Good times...

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dot files in Windows and

Posted Mar 25, 2009 23:42 UTC (Wed) by dwheeler (guest, #1216) [Link] (1 responses)

No cringe. I didn't see any control characters there, nor leading dashes. And you don't seem to require non-UTF-8. If we could get those done, the rest are gravy.

dot files in Windows and

Posted Mar 26, 2009 0:07 UTC (Thu) by pr1268 (guest, #24648) [Link]

Wow, thanks for the reply! And thank you for the original article--I found myself nodding in agreement many times while reading it.

Of course, even with your non-cringing approval, I certainly had lots of shell escaping to do with these files (and many others--my collection is approaching 10,000 audio files from almost 900 music CDs).

dot files in Windows and

Posted Mar 26, 2009 1:04 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (1 responses)

Hah, that's nothing: I saw a directory called '.. ' a while back, while
looking at an attacked system's disk image (for fun, I have no life).

dot files in Windows and

Posted Mar 26, 2009 10:21 UTC (Thu) by mjj29 (guest, #49653) [Link]

I've seen ... in that context too