newbie question

Brian Keefer mgomes21 at cox.net
Sun Aug 11 20:49:31 UTC 2002


Andreas Raab wrote:
> 
> Ezhil,
> 
> Windows file names cannot contain certain characters and the colon is
> one of them (colons are used for "special" file names like "COM1:",
> "LPT1:" etc). From your description, it is not entirely clear to me what
> you mean by "anticipating what the equivalent Windows file name will
> be". If the file is created by Squeak, then these characters will be
> replaced by hashmarks (#) and a file name like "foo:bar" would come out
> as "foo#bar" (this is a standing rule on which you can rely). However,
> if you mean that these files are copied to a Windows machine and get
> replaced during this process then it depends on the mechanism you use
> for copying. This is something you need to investigate and I can't be of
> help here.
> 
> Generally, it is best not to use common special characters in file names
> (colons, slashes etc). If you can (for example) replace the colons with
> a minus life will be much easier for you ;-)

Colons are illegal in Winders because they are needed for mount-points
(C:). con, com#, lpt#, nul, and a few other magical names are interpreted
by DOS VFS to redirect to a driver, and you can crash any Win9x box by
accessing C:\nul\nul (fun fact from E2!). Many other characters are taken
by command.com (and Explorer) to be special metacharacters, and are made
illegal rather than giving an \escape character.
If you're exporting the files through samba, it might support decent
control of mangling (though I couldn't find it). If the files don't move
around too much, you could also make a seperate directory tree of just
symlinks, and mangle the names of the links.



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