Thankyou Andreas and Brian. I am sorry my post was not very clear. The
data files are not written using Squeak. I am trying to use Squeak to
extract and analyse information from existing data files using Squeak on
Windows. There is no way I can change the way filenames are written
either. By asking if I could 'anticipate' - I meant that when I know the
name of the file I want to look at - I see on Windows NT explorer that the
names are displayed differently and cannot tell which file is the one I am
looking for. So I was wondering if I could tell how the conversion went.
Anyway, I understand that the colons in the file names are causing the
problem and that Samba is doing the conversion! Unfortunately creating
symlinks for the files is not an option for us as hundreds of files are
newly created everyday.

thanks again
Ezhil

On Sun, 11 Aug 2002, Brian Keefer wrote:

>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.
>
>