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From: jbray@bbn-unix@sri-unix.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.unix-wizards
Subject: re: funny characters in filenames
Message-ID: <3672@sri-arpa.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 31-Jul-83 17:13:23 EDT
Article-I.D.: sri-arpa.3672
Posted: Sun Jul 31 17:13:23 1983
Date-Received: Tue, 2-Aug-83 13:29:34 EDT
Lines: 15

From:  James Bray <jbray@bbn-unix>

I was discussing this with my collegue Ralph Muha, who suggested simply
disallowing anything <= ' ' or =>= \177 (<delete>). This is delightfully
straightforward, and I don't think there could be any legitimate complaints
about such restriction. Even if it should inconvenience someone, I would still
be more concerned with the people like the poor user who called me up with
what certainly looked like a filesystem problem until we saw that what had
happened was that her tty was set to default special characters and she
had one file called "broadcast" and another called "brao\b\boacast" (in
the same directory) which looked the same until I od'd it. Now we can say
that next time we will od the directory the very first thing something looks
like this, and I am sure I would, but not all users are hackers... I think I'll
do it, stick the test in wdir() or some such place.
--Jim