Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!cmcl2!brl-adm!brl-smoke!gwyn
From: gwyn@brl-smoke.ARPA (Doug Gwyn )
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: FileNames with the high bit set.
Message-ID: <7653@brl-smoke.ARPA>
Date: 10 Apr 88 23:50:44 GMT
References: <8120010@eecs.nwu.edu>
Reply-To: gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) <gwyn>)
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab (BRL), APG, MD.
Lines: 10

In article <8120010@eecs.nwu.edu> naim@eecs.nwu.edu (Naim Abdullah) writes:
>... open(2) and creat(2) return EINVAL if the pathname
>supplied to them has a character with the high order bit set.

I don't recall exactly which release of 4BSD introduced this "yet
another better idea", somewhere around 4.1cBSD I think.  Yes, it
is a bogus feature.  Note that the latest Bourne shells from AT&T
no longer mess around with the high bits of characters in names.
(The latest releases of the Korn shell also have this fixed.)  I
think vendors have finally realized that 7-bit ASCII is parochial.