Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!bu-cs!bzs
From: bzs@bu-cs.BU.EDU (Barry Shein)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: FileNames with the high bit set.
Message-ID: <21438@bu-cs.BU.EDU>
Date: 11 Apr 88 03:38:27 GMT
References: <8120010@eecs.nwu.edu> <7653@brl-smoke.ARPA>
Organization: Boston U. Comp. Sci.
Lines: 24
In-reply-to: gwyn@brl-smoke.ARPA's message of 10 Apr 88 23:50:44 GMT



From Doug Gwyn...
>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.

Yes, I agree it's bogus and interferes severely with some
internationalization schemes. I believe vendors are starting to remove
it from their 4BSD based systems.

Didn't that start because you couldn't rm or otherwise name 8-bit
files from the shells which eventually proved a nuisance? I believe
that some earlier versions of Emacs used this to create backup files
for just this reason (I remember groan comments in CCA Emacs about
this going away near some ifdef's.)

	-Barry Shein, Boston University