Apple ][/II/2

[Sridhar Ayengar]

Patrick Finnegan wrote:
> On Monday 03 March 2008 20:08, Sridhar Ayengar wrote:
>> Fred Cisin wrote:
>>> On Mon, 3 Mar 2008, Sridhar Ayengar wrote:
>>>> And there really isn't any reason one cannot create filenames with
>>>> slashes in them in UNIX.  The only OS I know of that completely
>>>> prohibits it is Windows.
>>> Even Windoze can't stop us from creating files with "invalid"
>>> filenames.
>>>
>>> You can also create a file named *.*
>>> (getting rid of it may be harder)
>> Except, in UNIX, one can have a completely *valid* filename with
>> slashes in it.  Or almost any other character in the system
>> character-set really.
> 
> No you can't.  The only two characters you can't have in a filename 
> are "/" and NUL, as far as the kernel is concerned.  Of course, you can 
> have a "\", but that's properly called a "backslash" not a "slash". :)
> 
> I ran into this problem at work once; the HSM we use exports itself as 
> an nfs share, and through timezone settings it didn't like, "/" got 
> inserted into filenames that it automatically generated when useres 
> deleted files.
> 
> I can site a reference even (though a different one than I remember 
> looking at when I was trying out how to fix the HSM):
> http://www.faqs.org/faqs/unix-faq/faq/part2/section-2.html
> 
> I can't think of any UNIX(-alike) kernel that wouldn't interpret a "/" 
> passed to it in a filename as a directory separator. The only way to 
> get around this is to go around the kernel and poke at the filesystem 
> (or filesystem drivers) yourself, to convince them to shoot you in the 
> foot.

I've done it, so I know it's possible.  And I didn't have to do anything 
in the kernel to do it.

That's not to say that I didn't do something very strange in a program I 
was writing to do it, but the file sat there happily in my filesystem. 
ls(1) displayed its name just fine.  rm(1) couldn't remove it, so I had 
to do something similarly strange to remove it.

Peace...  Sridhar