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From: guy@gorodish.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions,comp.unix.wizards,comp.unix.xenix
Subject: Re: Confused file name in directory
Message-ID: <14303@sun.uucp>
Date: Sat, 28-Feb-87 23:40:50 EST
Article-I.D.: sun.14303
Posted: Sat Feb 28 23:40:50 1987
Date-Received: Mon, 2-Mar-87 05:11:58 EST
References: <105@aob.UUCP> <563@aw.sei.cmu.edu.sei.cmu.edu> <5587@mimsy.UUCP> <6977@clyde.ATT.COM>
Sender: news@sun.uucp
Reply-To: guy@sun.UUCP (Guy Harris)
Organization: Sun Microsystems, Mountain View
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Xref: utgpu comp.unix.questions:1232 comp.unix.wizards:1181 comp.unix.xenix:133

>>In article <105@aob.UUCP> someone finds a directory entry with an
>>embedded NUL, and has nothing handy to fix it.
>
>I have a public-domain c program call rmfile which is interactive
>and lets you either delete or rename files (including those with
>garbage characters in their names).  I've never paid attention to
>how it works, but I've used it and it DOES work.

Unless this program does so by opening the raw disk and writing
directly on the directories, it *cannot* work if you try to use it to
handle files with embedded NULs in their names.  Since the file names
passed as arguments to UNIX system calls are C strings, which *by
definition* cannot have embedded NULs, no UNIX system call can
possibly refer to such a file (unless you throw in a system call that
takes character arrays representing containing NON-NUL-terminated
strings as arguments).