Re: non-unix help needed: valid filename characters?

[Howard Chu <hyc@symas.com>]

Hallvard B Furuseth wrote:
> Heh.  Thanks for the info.  Have you built OpenLDAP on everything?

That's what we (Symas) do. ;)   You forget that outside of OpenLDAP I have 
code running on 98% of the computers in the world. (And a few off the world 
too...)

> I expected I'd need advice from half a dozen different people:-)

> Howard Chu writes:
> > MacOSX supports both BSD UFS and Mac HFS(+). In UFS a forward slash is
> > reserved as a path separator, while in HFS the colon serves that purpose.
> > MacOSX swaps the two whenever they appear in the wrong filesystem.
> >
> > (...) Currently the MacOSX FileManager will always display paths with
> > "/" as the separator, so it's simplest to treat MacOSX the same as
> > Unix/POSIX.
>
> Might as well hex-escape ':' on all systems, since it's troublesome at
> least for the users on both MacOSX and Windows.

Fair enough.
> (And '/', 8-bit and control chars, and a special hack for windows
> according to your latest message on the ITS.)

Honestly, I wouldn't make any special effort for control characters. All the 
filesystems we touch accept them. (Makes life interesting when you're trying 
to enter a filename at the command line, but what the heck, you can always 
glob it.) 8-bit I'm not so sure about, some filesystems expect UTF-8, while 
others are 8-bit clean to begin with. If we can expect that no one is going to 
use an octetString as a naming attribute, I think we'll be fine since 
everything else will be in UTF-8 anyway.
--
  -- Howard Chu
  CTO, Symas Corp.           http://www.symas.com
  Director, Highland Sun     http://highlandsun.com/hyc/
  Chief Architect, OpenLDAP  http://www.openldap.org/project/