In message 66N Diesel wrote:
Lewis
Tue, 02 Jan 2018 16:23:51
GMT in alt.windows7.general, wrote:

In message 66N
Diesel wrote:
Lewis
Fri, 29 Dec 2017 14:10:59
GMT in alt.windows7.general, wrote:

In message
XnsA859B16E258BDHT1@xhJI5gJTbKLpQ4Eq6Ez94drHGcwsn 569oeX.T2d
Diesel wrote:
Paul news Sun, 17 Dec 2017 11:01:28 GMT in alt.windows7.general, wrote:

Can I use é in 8.3 ? Probably not :-) They "hadn't invented
foreigners yet", when they did 8.3 :-)

This might surprise you to learn then...

8.3 will use 'extended ascii' aside from a couple. [g] And,
even those, as long as they aren't used as the first character
*can* be used. AFAIK, You can do the same with LFN based names.
How do I know this? Personal experience. I've done it. Even
went so far as to do something very sneaky and wrote a tiny
program that would not only rename folders/files to 8.3
extended ascii, but occasionally play with the hidden/system
bit settings for them as well. It did a fairly good job of
simulating a 'hard disk crash' to the untrained eye.

However, many many characters will break in SMB, so ig you name
a file

SMB wasn't being discussed. Allowed characters in a filename
were. From the OS perspective, the majority of the extended ascii
character set is allowed and has been for a long long time.

Ignoring SMB issues when talking about Windows filenames is myopic
in the extreme.

As far as i'm concerned, SMB is just an attempt to side track the
original discussion.

OK, I thought it was a natural evolution from saying "windows supports
weird characters" because windows networking (which a whole lot of
people use, often without knowing it) does not support it. Think it more
as a warning for a passing reader.

The use with Windows files names it that it forbids MANY common
characters. while every other OS seem to be fine forbidding a
single character.

Some parts of the Windows OS as a whole do, yes. The OS itself for
the most part, does not.

Not sure what distinction you are making there. Windows will not allow
you to name a file with any of " / \ ? * | (yes, quote is a
forbidden character). You also cannot use '..' in any part of a
filename. You also cannot use NULL or any ASCII character with a value
under 32 (decimal).

That is according to Microsoft, which also has a list of universally
reserved filnames, and warnings to never end a filename or directory
name with a space for ... reasons.

The list of forbidden characters on Unix is "/" and the list of
forbidden characters on macOS is ":", and neither OS will complain about
a file ending in a . and, as far as I know, neither has reserved
filenames that you cannot use.

It's mainly an issue with API (formally
interrupts, but that was a long time ago) parsing and file browsing
from a gui perspective which is where you can run into trouble. I
can't state at this point with certainty that Linux based distro's
don't also have more than one character that you can't use for a
filename, but I suspect they do. I can think of atleast one ascii
character that most OSes, I suspect mac included would have a problem
with. The ascii code that represents our enter key; which I think is
still called a return key on macs? Another one, off the top of my
head would be the ascii character code for null as the first letter,

It's possible that null in the first position might be an issue, but it
is not an issue within the filename. I have certainly had filenames with
ASCII(13) (return) in them in the past, and I currently have a file on
my desktop with a ASCII(9) (tab) in the filename.

I don't consider some characters as being reserved so that you
cannot/shouldn't/aren't supposed to use them as part of a filename to
be an issue.

It is an issue when it's a list of characters you have to remember, all
of which would reasonably be useful in a filename/folder name.

Invoices 2010
Invoices 01/2012
Photos 12:00-13:00
"Weird" Al Yankovic/
*** Important Docs
||| Temporary Trash
Final? Paper


If ONE of those has to be worked around because of the OS, that's one
thing, but when all of them are forbidden, it is an issue.

I treat the filename character limitations you seem to have a problem
with the same way. I don't often find myself needing to use slashes
to represent a date for example. periods work fine for that purpose.

You've trained yourself to work around the limitations of Windows naming
convention, that doens't make those limitations a good thing, it just
means you've learned them.

As in 6.18.2027 or something. Personally, I find visually reading it
to be more appealing to my eyes than 06/18/2027 is. YMMV

If / was the only forbidden character, that would be quite different,
but you have to have ways to work around quite a lot of characters.

--
'They're the cream!' Rincewind sighed. 'Cohen, they're the cheese.'